THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  LOYALTY 


BY 
JOSIAH   ROYCE 

PROFESSOR   OF   THE    HISTORY   OF   PHILOSOPHY 
IN   HARVARD   UNIVERSITY 


Nefo  g0tfc 

THE  MACMILLAN   COMPANY 
1914 

All  rights  reserved 


Copyright,  1908, 
By  THE  MACMILLAN   COMPANY. 


Set  up  and  electrotyped.     Published  March,  1908.     Reprinted 
August,  December,  1908;  July,  1909  ;  December,  1911;  February, 

1914- 


J.  8.  Gushing  Co.  —  Berwick  &  Smith  Co. 
Norwood,  Mass.,  U.S.A. 


PREFACE 


In  1906  and  1907  I  gave,  as  a  part  of  my 
regular  work  at  the  Summer  School  of  Har- 
vard University,  an  "  Introduction  to  Ethics, 
with  Special  Reference  to  the  Interests  of 
Teachers."  A  few  lectures,  summing  up  the 
main  principles  that  lay  at  the  basis  of  this 
ethical  course  as  it  had  been  given  in  the 
summer  of  1906,  were  delivered  in  January 
and  February,  1907,  before  a  general  academic 
audience,  during  a  brief  visit  of  mine  at  the 
University  of  Illinois.  In  several  other  places, 
both  in  the  West  and  in  the  East,  I  have  also 
presented  portions  of  my  views  upon  ethics; 
and  in  the  summer  of  1907  four  general 
lectures  on  the  topic  were  repeated  before 
the  Summer  School  of  Theology  at  Harvard. 
In  November  and  December  of  1907  the 
lectures  that  constitute  the  present  book  were 
delivered  for  the  first  time  before  the  Lowell 
Institute  in  Boston. 


vi  PREFACE 

In  preparing  this  new  statement  of  my  case 
for  the  Lowell  Institute  course,  I  thus  had 
the  opportunity  to  use  the  experience  and 
the  criticisms  that  had  resulted  from  several 
previous  efforts  of  mine  to  set  forth  my  views 
about  the  topics  treated  in  this  "Philosophy 
of  Loyalty."  The  Lowell  Institute  lectures 
were,  in  fact,  substantially  a  fresh  presenta- 
tion of  the  material, — only  Lecture  V,  on 
"  American  Problems,"  retaining  any  large 
portion  of  the  text  of  any  of  my  former  lec- 
tures. But,  as  the  reader  may  see  from  the 
foregoing  statement,  the  general  doctrine  con- 
tained in  "  The  Philosophy  of  Loyalty  "  here 
worked  out  has  been  discussed,  in  various 
forms,  and  with  a  good  many  friends,  pupils, 
and  critics.  I  hope,  therefore,  that  this  book 
bears  marks  of  the  aid  that  I  have  gained 
from  such  contact  with  many  sorts  of  minds, 
in  widely  different  places. 

During  the  present  academic  year,  1907- 
1908,  the  doctrine  here  presented  has  also 
been  put  into  the  form  of  a  regular  college 
course,    which    I    have    been    permitted,    as 


PREFACE  vii 

visiting  lecturer,  to  give  to  undergraduate 
students  at  Yale  University  in  weekly  class- 
meetings. 

The  present  book,  although  in  this  way 
related  to  present  and  past  academic  tasks, 
is,  nevertheless,  not  a  text-book,  and  does  not 
mean  to  be  an  elaborately  technical  philo- 
sophical research.  It  is  simply  an  appeal  to 
any  reader  who  may  be  fond  of  ideals,  and 
who  may  also  be  willing  to  review  his  own 
ideals  in  a  somewhat  new  light  and  in  a 
philosophical  spirit.  Loyalty  is  indeed  an 
old  word,  and  to  my  mind  a  precious  one; 
and  the  general  idea  of  loyalty  is  still  far 
older  than  the  word,  and  is  immeasurably 
more  precious.  But  this  idea  has  nearly 
always  been  confused  in  men's  minds  by  its 
chance  social  and  traditional  associations. 
Everybody  has  heard  of  loyalty;  most  prize 
it;  but  few  perceive  it  to  be  what,  in  its  in- 
most spirit,  it  really  is,  —  the  heart  of  all  the 
virtues,  the  central  duty  amongst  all  duties. 
In  order  to  be  able  to  see  that  this  is  the  true 
meaning  of  the  idea  of  loyalty,  one  has  to  free 


viii  PREFACE 

this  idea  from  its  unessential  if  somewhat 
settled  associations  with  this  or  that  special 
social  habit  or  circumstance.  And  in  order 
to  accomplish  this  latter  end,  one  has  indeed 
to  give  to  the  term  a  more  exact  meaning  than 
popular  usage  defines. 

It  is  this  freeing  of  the  idea  of  loyalty  from 
its  chance  and  misleading  associations;  it  is 
this  vindication  of  the  spirit  of  loyalty  as  the 
central  spirit  of  the  moral  and  reasonable  life 
of  man,  —  it  is  this  that  I  believe  to  be  some- 
what new  about  my  "  Philosophy  of  Loyalty." 
The  conception  of  "  Loyalty  to  Loyalty,"  as 
set  forth  in  my  third  lecture,  constitutes  the 
most  significant  part  of  this  ethical  task.  For 
the  rest,  if  my  philosophy  is,  as  a  theory,  more 
or  less  new,  I  am  still  only  trying  to  make 
articulate  what  I  believe  to  be  the  true  spirit 
and  meaning  of  all  the  loyal,  whoever  they 
may  be,  and  however  they  define  their  fidelity. 

The  result  of  conceiving  duty  in  terms  of 
the  conception  of  loyalty  which  is  here  ex- 
pounded is,  indeed,  if  I  am  right,  somewhat 
deep-going    and    transforming,   not    only   for 


PREFACE  ix 

ethics,  but  for  most  men's  views  of  truth  and 
reality,  and  of  religion.  My  own  general 
philosophical  opinions  have  been  set  forth  in 
various  works  some  time  since  (most  elabo- 
rately in  the  volumes  entitled  "  The  World 
and  the  Individual ").  I  have  no  change  to 
report  in  my  fundamental  metaphysical  theses. 
But  I  have  not  published  any  formulation  of 
my  ethical  opinions  since  the  brief  review 
of  ethical  problems  in  the  first  part  of  my 
"  Religious  Aspect  of  Philosophy  "  (published 
in  1885).  One  learns  a  good  deal  about 
ethics  as  one  matures.  And  I  believe  that 
this  present  statement  of  mine  ought  to  help 
at  least  some  readers  to  see  that  such  philo- 
sophical idealism  as  I  have  long  maintained 
is  not  a  doctrine  remote  from  life,  but  is  in 
close  touch  with  the  most  practical  issues; 
and  that  religion,  as  well  as  daily  life,  has 
much  to  gain  from  the  right  union  of  ethics 
with  a  philosophical  theory  of  the  real  world. 

At  the  moment  there  is  much  speech,  in 
current  philosophical  literature,  regarding  the 
"  nature   of    truth "    and    regarding    "  prag- 


x  PREFACE 

matism."  An  ethical  treatise  very  naturally 
takes  advantage  of  this  situation  to  discuss 
the  relation  between  the  "  practical "  and  — 
the  Eternal.  I  have  done  so  in  my  closing 
lectures.  In  order  to  do  so,  I  have  had  to 
engage  in  a  certain  polemic  regarding  the 
problem  of  truth,  —  a  polemic  directed  against 
certain  opinions  recently  set  forth  by  one  of 
the  dearest  of  my  friends,  and  by  one  of  the 
most  loyal  of  men;  my  teacher  for  a  while  in 
my  youth;  my  honored  colleague  for  many 
years,  —  Professor  William  James.  Such  a 
polemic  would  be  indeed  much  out  of  place 
in  a  book  upon  Loyalty,  were  it  not  that  my 
friend  and  myself  fully  agree  that,  to  both  of 
us,  truth  indeed  "  is  the  greater  friend."  Had 
I  not  very  early  in  my  work  as  a  student 
known  Professor  James,  I  doubt  whether  any 
poor  book  of  mine  would  ever  have  been 
written,  —  least  of  all  the  present  one.  What 
I  personally  owe  him,  then,  I  most  heartily 
and  affectionately  acknowledge.  But  if  he 
and  I  do  not  see  truth  in  the  same  light  at 
present,  we  still  do  well,  I  think,  as  friends, 


PREFACE  jd 

each  to  speak  his  mind  as  we  walk  by  the 
way,  and  then  to  wait  until  some  other  light 
shines  for  our  eyes.  I  suppose  that  so  to 
do  is  loyalty. 

Meanwhile,  I  am  writing,  in  this  book,  not 
merely  and  not  mainly  for  philosophers,  but 
for  all  those  who  love,  as  I  said,  ideals,  and 
also  for  those  who  love,  as  I  may  now  add, 
their  country,  —  a  country  so  ripe  at  present 
for  idealism,  and  so  confused,  nevertheless, 
by  the  vastness  and  the  complication  of  its 
social  and  political  problems.  To  simplify 
men's  moral  issues,  to  clear  their  vision  for 
the  sight  of  the  eternal,  to  win  hearts  for 
loyalty,  —  this  would  be,  in  this  land,  a 
peculiarly  precious  mission,  if  indeed  I  could 
hope  that  this  book  could  aid,  however  little, 
towards  such  an  end. 

Amongst  the  numerous  friends  to  whom 
(whether  or  no  they  agree  with  all  my  views) 
I  am  especially  indebted  for  direct  and  in- 
direct aid  in  preparing  this  book,  and  for 
criticisms  and  other  suggestions,  I  must  men- 
tion:   first,    my    wife,    who    has    constantly 


xii  PREFACE 

helped  me  with  her  counsel,  and  in  the 
revision  of  my  text ;  then,  my  sister,  Miss 
Ruth  Royce,  of  San  Jose,  California,  with 
whom  I  discussed  the  plan  of  the  work  in 
the  summer  of  1907;  then,  Doctor  and  Mrs. 
R.  C.  Cabot  of  Boston;  Doctor  J.  J.  Putnam 
of  Boston;  and,  finally,  my  honored  col- 
league, Professor  George  H.  Palmer. 

Harvard  University, 

Cambridge,  Massachusetts, 
March  1,  1908. 


CONTENTS 


LSOTTJRB 

I.     Nature  and  Need  of  Loyalty 


II.     Individualism      . 

III.  Loyalty  to  Loyalty 

IV.  Conscience 


V.     Some  American  Problems  in  their  Rela 
tion  to  Loyalty 


VI.     Training  for  Loyalty 
VII.     Loyalty,  Truth,  and  Reality 
VIII.     Loyalty  and  Religion 


PAUK 
1 

49 

99 
147 

197 
249 
299 
349 


xiii 


I 

NATURE  AND  NEED  OP  LOYALTY 


LECTURE  I 

THE  NATURE  AND  THE  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

ONE  of  the  most  familiar  traits  of  our  time 
is  the  tendency  to  revise  tradition,  to 
reconsider  the  foundations  of  old  beliefs,  and 
sometimes  mercilessly  to  destroy  what  once 
seemed  indispensable.  This  disposition,  as 
we  all  know,  is  especially  prominent  in  the 
realms  of  social  theory  and  of  religious  be-  | 
lief.  But  even  the  exact  sciences  do  not 
escape  from  the  influence  of  those  who  are 
fond  of  the  reexamination  of  dogmas.  And 
the  modern  tendency  in  question  has,  of  late 
years,  been  very  notable  in  the  field  of  Ethics. 
Conventional  morality  has  been  required, 
in  company  with  religion,  and  also  in  com- 
pany with  exact  science,  to  endure  the  fire 
of  criticism.  And  although,  in  all  ages,  the 
moral  law  has  indeed  been  exposed  to  the 
assaults  of  the  wayward,  the  peculiar  moral 
situation  of  our  time  is  this,  that  it  is  no 
longer  either  the  flippant  or  the  vicious  who 

3 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

are  the  most  pronounced  or  the  most  dan- 
gerous opponents  of  our  moral  traditions. 
Devoted  reformers,  earnest  public  servants, 
ardent  prophets  of  a  coming  spiritual  order, 
—  all  these  types  of  lovers  of  humanity  are 
represented  amongst  those  who  to-day  de- 
mand great  and  deep  changes  in  the  moral 
standards  by  which  our  lives  are  to  be  gov- 
erned. We  have  become  accustomed,  during 
the  past  few  generations,  —  during  the  period 
of  Socialism  and  of  Individualism,  of  Karl 
Marx,  of  Henry  George,  of  Ibsen,  of  Nietz- 
sche, of  Tolstoi,  —  to  hear  unquestionably 
sincere  lovers  of  humanity  sometimes  declar- 
ing our  traditions  regarding  the  rights  of 
property  to  be  immoral,  and  sometimes  as- 
sailing, in  the  name  of  virtue,  our  present 
family  ties  as  essentially  unworthy  of  the 
highest  ideals.  Individualism  itself,  in  many 
rebellious  forms,  we  often  find  asserting  that 
it  speaks  in  the  name  of  the  true  morality 
of  the  future.  And  the  movement  begun 
in  Germany  by  Nietzsche  —  the  tendency 
towards  what   that    philosophical    rhapsodist 

4 


' 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

called  the  "transmutation  of  all  moral  val- 
ues "  —  has  in  recent  years  made  popular 
the  thesis  that  all  the  conventional  morality 
of  the  past,  whatever  may  have  been  its  in- 
evitableness,  or  its  temporary  usefulness,  was 
in  principle  false,  was  a  mere  transition  stage 
of  evolution,  and  must  be  altered  to  the  core. 
"Time  makes  ancient  good  uncouth":  in  this 
well-known  word  one  might  sum  up  the  spirit 
of  this  modern  revolt  against  moral  traditions. 
Now  when  we  review  the  recent  moral 
controversies  that  express  this  sort  of  ques- 
tioning, some  of  us  find  ourselves  especially 
troubled  and  bewildered.  We  all  feel  that 
if  the  foundations  of  the  exact  sciences  are 
to  be  criticised  by  the  restless  spirit  of  our 
reforming  age,  the  exact  sciences  are  indeed 
well  able  to  take  care  of  themselves.  And  as 
for  religion,  —  if  its  fortunes  have  indeed, 
of  late,  deeply  troubled  and  perplexed  many 
gentle  hearts,  still  both  believers  and  doubters 
have  now  generally  come  to  view  with  a  cer- 
tain resignation  this  aspect  of  the  fate  of  our 
time,  whether  they  regard  religious  doubt  as 

5 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

the  result  of  God's  way  of  dealing  with  a  way- 
ward world,  or  as  a  sign  of  man's  transition 
to  a  higher  stage  of  enlightenment. 

But  restlessness  regarding  the  very  founda- 
tions of  morality  —  that  seems  to  many  of  us 
especially  discouraging.  For  that  concerns 
both  the  seen  and  the  unseen  world,  both 
the  truths  that  justify  the  toil  spent  upon 
exact  science,  and  the  hopes  for  the  love  of 
which  the  religions  of  men  have  seemed  dear. 
For  what  is  science  worth,  and  what  is  religion 
worth,  if  human  life  itself,  for  whose  ennoble- 
ment science  and  religion  have  both  labored, 
has  no  genuine  moral  standards  by  which 
one  may  measure  its  value  ?  If,  then,  our 
moral  standards  themselves  are  questioned, 
the  iron  of  doubt  —  so  some  of  us  feel  — 
seems  to  enter  our  very  hearts. 

I 

In  view,  then,  of  the  fact  that  the  modern 
tendency  to  revise  traditions  has  inevitably 
extended  itself,  in  new  ways,  to  the  region 
of  morals,  I  suppose  that  a  study  of  some  of 

6 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

the  foundations  of  the  moral  life  is  a  timely 
undertaking.  It  is  such  an  undertaking  that 
I  propose  as  the  task  of  the  present  course  of 
lectures.  My  purpose,  in  these  discussions, 
is  both  a  philosophical  and  a  practical  pur- 
pose. I  should  indeed  be  glad,  if  there  were 
time,  to  attempt,  in  your  company,  a  systematic 
review  of  all  the  main  problems  of  philosoph- 
ical ethics.  That  is,  I  should  like,  were  that 
possible,  to  discuss  with  you  at  length  the 
nature,  the  foundation,  and  the  truth  of  the 
moral  law,  approaching  that  problem  from 
all  those  various  sides  which  interest  philoso- 
phers. And,  as  a  fact,  I  shall  indeed  venture 
to  say  something,  in  the  course  of  these  lec- 
tures, regarding  each  of  these  topics.  But 
I  well  know  that  there  is  no  space,  in  eight 
lectures,  for  any  adequate  treatment  of  that 
branch  of  philosophy  which  is  called  Ethics. 
Nor  do  you  come  here  merely  or  mainly  for 
the  sake  of  hearing  what  a  student  of  philoso- 
phy chances  to  think  about  the  problems  of  his 
own  calling.  Accordingly,  I  shall  not  try,  in 
this  place,  to  state  to  you  any  system  of  moral 

7 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

philosophy.  Rather  is  it  the  other  aspect  of 
my  purpose  in  appealing  to  you  — the  prac- 
tical aspect,  which  I  must  especially  try  to  bear 
in  mind  throughout  these  lectures. 

Our  age,  as  I  have  said,  is  a  good  deal  per- 
plexed regarding  its  moral  ideals  and  its  stand- 
ards of  duty.  It  has  doubts  about  what  is 
really  the  best  plan  of  human  life.  This  per- 
plexity is  not  wholly  due  to  any  peculiar  way- 
wardness of  our  time,  or  to  any  general  lack 
of  moral  seriousness.  It  is  just  our  moral 
leaders,  our  reformers,  our  prophets,  who  most 
perplex  us.  Whether  these  revolutionary  moral 
teachers  are  right  or  wrong,  they  beset  us, 
they  give  us  no  rest,  they  call  in  doubt  our 
moral  judgments,  they  undertake  to  "trans- 
mute values."  And  the  result,  for  many  of  us, 
is  a  practical  result.  It  tends  to  deprive  us 
of  that  confidence  which  we  all  need  in  order  to 
be  ready  to  do  good  works.  It  threatens  to  par- 
alyze the  effectiveness  of  many  conscientious 
people.  Hence  any  effort  to  reason  calmly 
and  constructively  about  the  foundations  of  the 
moral  life  may  serve,  not  merely  to  clarify  our 

8 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

minds,  but  to  give  vigor  to  our  deeds.  In  these 
lectures,  then,  I  shall  ask  you  to  think  indeed 
about  moral  problems,  but  to  think  for  the 
sake  of  action.  I  shall  try  to  give  you  some 
fragments  of  a  moral  philosophy;  but  I  shall 
try  to  justify  the  philosophy  through  its  appli- 
cation to  life.  I  do  not  much  care  whether 
you  agree  with  the  letter  of  any  of  my  philo- 
sophical formulas ;  but  I  do  want  to  bring  to 
your  consciousness,  by  means  of  these  formu- 
las, a  certain  spirit  in  terms  of  which  you  may 
henceforth  be  helped  to  interpret  the  life  that 
we  all  in  common  need  to  live.  Meanwhile, 
I  do  not  want  merely  to  refute  those  reformers 
and  prophets  of  whose  perplexing  assaults 
upon  our  moral  traditions  I  have  just  spoken, 
nor  yet  do  I  want  to  join  myself  with  them  in 
perplexing  you  still  further.  I  want,  as  far  as 
I  can,  to  indicate  some  ways  whereby  we  may 
clarify  and  simplify  our  moral  situation. 

I  indeed  agree  with  the  view  that,  in  many 
ways,  our  traditional  moral  standards  ought  to 
be  revised.  We  need  a  new  heaven  and  a  new 
earth.     We  do  well  to  set  out  to  seek  for  both, 

9 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF    LOYALTY 

however  hard  or  doubtful  may  be  the  quest. 
In  so  far  as  our  restlessness  about  moral 
matters — our  unsettlement — implies  a  sense 
of  this  need,  it  is  a  good  thing.  To  use  a  com- 
parison suggested  by  modern  Biblical  criticism 
—  our  conventional  morality  is  indeed  a  sort 
of  Pentateuch,  made  up  of  many  ancient  docu- 
ments. It  has  often  been  edited  afresh.  It 
needs  critical  reexamination.  I  am  a  student 
of  philosophy.  My  principal  business  has 
always  been  criticism.  I  shall  propose  noth- 
ing in  this  course  which  I  have  not  tried  to 
submit  to  critical  standards,  and  to  revise 
repeatedly. 

But,  on  the  other  hand,  I  do  not  believe  that 
unsettlement  is  finality.  Nor  to  my  mind  is 
the  last  word  of  human  wisdom  this  :  that  the 
truth  is  inaccessible.  Nor  yet  is  the  last  word 
of  wisdom  this  :  that  the  truth  is  merely  fluent 
and  transient.  I  believe  in  the  eternal.  I  am 
in  quest  of  the  eternal.  As  to  moral  stand- 
ards, in  particular,  I  do  not  like  that  mere 
homesickness  and  spiritual  estrangement,  and 
that  confusion  of  mind  about  moral  ideals, 

10  , 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

which  is  nowadays,  too  com.mon.  I  want  to 
know  the  way  that  leads  our  human  practical 
life  homewards,  even  if  that  way  prove  to  be 
infinitely  long.  I  am  discontented  with  mere 
discontent.  I  want,  as  well  as  I  can,  not 
merely  to  help  you  to  revise  some  of  your 
moral  standards,  but  to  help  you  to  give  to  this 
revision  some  definitive  form  and  tendency, 
some  image  and  hint  of  finality. 

Moreover,  since  moral  standards,  as  An- 
tigone said,  are  not  of  to-day  or  yesterday, 
I  believe  that  revision  does  not  mean,  in  this 
field,  a  mere  break  with  the  past.  I  myself 
have  spent  my  life  in  revising  my  opinions. 
And  yet,  whenever  I  have  most  carefully  re- 
vised my  moral  standards,  I  am  always  able  to 
see,  upon  reviewing  my  course  of  thought, 
that  at  best  I  have  been  finding  out,  in  some 
new  light,  the  true  meaning  that  was  latent 
in  old  traditions.  Those  traditions  were  often 
better  in  spirit  than  the  fathers  knew.  We 
who  revise  may  sometimes  be  able  to  see  this 
better  meaning  that  was  latent  in  forms  such 
as  are  now  antiquated,  and  perhaps,  in  their 

11 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

old  literal  interpretation,  even  mischievous. 
Revision  does  not  mean  mere  destruction.  We 
can  often  say  to  tradition :  That  which  thou 
so  west  is  not  quickened  except  it  die.  But 
we  can  sometimes  see  in  the  world  of  opinion 
a  sort  of  resurrection  of  the  dead,  — a  resur- 
rection wherein  what  was  indeed  justly  sown 
in  dishonor  is  raised  in  honor,  — glorified,  — 
and  perhaps  incorruptible.  Let  us  bury  the 
natural  body  of  tradition.  What  we  want  is 
its  glorified  body  and  its  immortal  soul. 

II 

I  have  entitled  these  lectures,  "The  Phi- 
losophy of  Loyalty."  I  may  as  well  confess 
at  once  that  my  title  was  suggested  to  me,  early 
last  summer,  by  a  book  that  I  read  —  a  recent 
work  by  a  distinguished  ethnologist,  Dr.  Ru- 
dolf Steinmetz  of  The  Hague,  entitled  "The 
Philosophy  of  War."  War  and  loyalty  have 
been,  in  the  past,  two  very  closely  associated 
ideas.  It  will  be  part  of  the  task  of  these  lec- 
tures to  break  up,  so  far  as  I  can,  in  your  own 
minds,  that  ancient  and  disastrous  association, 

12 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

and  to  show  how  much  the  true  conception 
of  loyalty  has  been  obscured  by  viewing  the 
warrior  as  the  most  typical  representative  of 
rational  loyalty.  Steinmetz,  however,  accepts, 
in  this  respect,  the  traditional  view.  According 
to  him,  war  gives  an  opportunity  for  loyal 
devotion  so  notable  and  important  that,  if 
war  were  altogether  abolished,  one  of  the 
greatest  goods  of  civilization  would  thereby  be 
hopelessly  lost.  I  am  keenly  conscious  of  the 
sharp  contrast  between  Steinmetz 's  theory  of 
loyalty  and  my  own.  I  agree  with  Steinmetz, 
as  you  will  later  see,  regarding  the  significance 
of  loyalty  as  a  central  principle  of  the  moral 
life.  I  disagree  with  him  very  profoundly  as 
to  the  relation  of  war  both  to  true  loyalty  and 
to  civilization  in  general.  The  very  contrast 
has  suggested  to  me  the  adoption  of  the  form 
of  title  which  Steinmetz  has  used. 

The  phrase,  "Philosophy  of  Loyalty,"  is 
intended  to  indicate  first,  that  we  are  here  to 
consider  loyalty  as  an  ethical  principle.  For 
philosophy  deals  with  first  principles.  And 
secondly,  my  title  means  to  suggest  that  we 

13 


w 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

are  to  view  the  matter  critically  and  dis- 
criminatingly, as  well  as  practically.  For 
philosophy  is  essentially  a  criticism  of  life. 
Not  everything,  then,  that  calls  itself  loyalty, 
and  not  every  form  of  loyalty,  shall  be  put  in 
our  discussion  on  the  same  level  with  every 
other  moral  quality  that  uses  or  that  deserves 
the  ancient  name  in  question.  Moreover, 
the  term  "loyalty"  comes  to  us  as  a  good  old 
popular  word,  without  any  exact  definition. 
We  are  hereafter  to  define  our  term  as  pre- 
cisely as  possible,  yet  so  as  to  preserve  the 
spirit  of  the  former  usage.  In  estimating  the 
place  of  loyalty  in  the  moral  life,  we  are,  more- 
over, to  follow  neither  traditional  authority 
nor  the  voice  of  private  prejudice.  We  are 
to  use  our  reason  as  best  we  can ;  for  philoso- 
phy is  an  effort  to  think  out  the  reasons  for 
our  opinions.  We  are  not  to  praise  blindly, 
nor  to  condemn  according  to  our  moods. 
Where  loyalty  seems  to  be  a  good,  we  are  to 
see  why;  when  what  men  call  loyalty  leads 
them  astray,  we  are  to  find  wherein  the  fault 
lies.     Since  loyalty  is  a  relative  term,  and  al- 

14 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

ways  implies  that  there  is  some  object,  some 
cause,  to  which  any  given  loyalty  is  to  be  shown, 
we  must  consider  what  are  the  fitting  objects 
of  loyalty.  In  attempting  an  answer  to  these 
various  questions,  our  philosophy  of  loyalty 
must  try  to  delve  down  to  the  roots  of  human 
conduct,  the  grounds  for  our  moral  standards, 
as  far  as  our  time  permits. 

But  when  all  these  efforts  have  been  made 
towards  a  philosophical  treatment  of  our  topic, 
when  certain  discriminations  between  true 
and  mistaken  loyalty  have  been  defined,  when 
we  have  insisted  upon  the  fitting  objects  of 
loyalty,  and  have  throughout  indicated  our 
reasons  for  our  theses,  there  will  then  stand 
out  one  great  practical  lesson,  which  I  shall 
try  to  illustrate  from  the  start,  and  to  bring 
to  its  fruition  as  our  lectures  close.  And  the 
lesson  will  be  this  :  In  loyalty \  when  loyalty  is  [ 
properly  defined,  is  the  fulfilment  of  the  whole 
moral  law.  You  can  truthfully  centre  your  en- 
tire moral  world  about  a  rational  conception 
of  loyalty.  Justice,  charity,  industry,  wisdom, 
spirituality,    are    all    definable    in    terms    of 

15 


i 


\J 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

enlightened  loyalty.  And,  as  I  shall  maintain, 
this  very  way  of  viewing  the  moral  world  — 
this  deliberate  centralization  of  all  the  duties 
and  of  all  the  virtues  about  the  one  conception 
of  rational  loyalty  —  is  of  great  service  as  a 
means  of  clarifying  and  simplifying  the  tangled 
moral  problems  of  our  lives  and  of  our  age. 

Thus,  then,  I  state  the  task  which  our  title 
is  intended  to  set  before  us.  The  rest  of  this 
opening  lecture  must  be  devoted  to  clearing 
our  way  — and  to  a  merely  preliminary  and 
tentative  view  of  our  topic.  I  must  first  at- 
tempt a  partial  and  provisional  definition  of 
the  term  "loyalty"  as  I  shall  use  that  term. 
I  wish  that  I  could  begin  with  a  final  and  ade- 
quate definition;  but  I  cannot.  Why  I  can- 
not, you  will  see  in  later  lectures.  At  the  mo- 
ment I  shall  try  to  direct  your  minds,  as  well 
as  I  can,  merely  to  some  of  the  features  that 
are  essential  to  my  conception  of  loyalty. 

Ill 

Loyalty  shall  mean,  according  to  this  pre- 
liminary definition  :    The  willing  and  practical 

16 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

and  thoroughgoing  devotion  of  a  person  to  a 
cause.  A  man  is  loyal  when,  first,  he  has  some 
cause  to  which  he  is  loyal ;  when,  secondly,  he 
willingly  and  thoroughly  devotes  himself  to 
this  cause  ;  and  when,  thirdly,  he  expresses  his 
devotion  in  some  sustained  and  practical  way, 
by  acting  steadily  in  the  service  of  his  cause. 
Instances  of  loyalty  are:  The  devotion  of  a 
patriot  to  his  country,  when  this  devotion  leads 
him  actually  to  live  and  perhaps  to  die  for  his 
country ;  the  devotion  of  a  martyr  to  his  reli- 
gion; the  devotion  of  a  ship's  captain  to  the 
requirements  of  his  office  when,  after  a  disaster, 
he  works  steadily  for  his  ship  and  for  the 
saving  of  his  ship's  company  until  the  last 
possible  service  is  accomplished,  so  that  he  is 
the  last  man  to  leave  the  ship,  and  is  ready  if 
need  be  to  go  down  with  his  ship. 

Such  cases  of  loyalty  are  typical.  They 
involve,  I  have  said,  the  willingness  of  the  loyal 
man  to  do  his  service.  The  loyal  man's  cause 
is  his  cause  by  virtue  of  the  assent  of  his  own 
will.  His  devotion  is  his  own.  He  chooses 
it,  or,  at  all  events,  approves  it.  Moreover, 
c  17 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

his  devotion  is  a  practical  one.  He  does 
something.     This  something  serves  his  cause. 

I  Loyalty  is  never  mere  emotion.  Adoration 
and  affection  may  go  with  loyalty,  but  can 
never  alone  constitute  loyalty.  Further- 
more, the  devotion  of  the  loyal  man  in- 
volves a  sort  of  restraint  or  submission  of 
his  natural  desires  to  his  cause.  Loyalty 
without  self-control  is  impossible.  The  loyal 
man  serves.  That  is,  he  does  not  merely 
follow  his  own  impulses.  He  looks  to  his 
cause  for  guidance.  This  cause  tells  him 
what  to  do,  and  he  does  it.  His  devotion, 
furthermore,  is  entire.  He  is  ready  to  live 
or  to  die  as  the  cause  directs. 

And  now  for  a  further  word  about  the  hard- 
est part  of  this  preliminary  definition  of  loyalty  : 
A  loyal  man,  I  have  said,  has  a  cause.  I  do 
not  yet  say  that  he  has  a  good  cause.  He 
might  have  a  bad  one.  I  do  not  say,  as  yet, 
what  makes  a  cause  a  good  one,  and  worthy  of 
loyalty.  All  that  is  to  be  considered  here- 
after. But  this  I  now  premise:  If  one  is 
loyal,  he  has  a  cause  which  he  indeed  per- 

18 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

son  ally  values.  Otherwise,  how  could  he  be 
devoted  to  it?  He  therefore  takes  interest  in 
the  cause,  loves  it,  is  well  pleased  with  it. 
On  the  other  hand,  loyalty  never  means  the 
mere  emotion  of  love  for  your  cause,  and  never 
means  merely  following  your  own  pleasure, 
viewed  as  your  private  pleasure  and  interest. 
For  if  you  are  loyal,  your  cause  is  viewed  by 
you  as  something  outside  of  you.  Or  if,  like 
your  country,  your  cause  includes  yourself, 
it  is  still  much  larger  than  your  private  self. 
It  has  its  own  value,  so  you  as  a  loyal  person 
believe.  This  essential  value  it  would  keep 
(so  you  believe)  even  if  your  private  interest 
were  left  out  of  account.  Your  cause  you 
take,  then,  to  be  something  objective  — some- 
thing that  is  not  your  private  self.  It  does  not 
get  its  value  merely  from  your  being  pleased 
with  it.  You  believe,  on  the  contrary,  that 
you  love  it  just  because  of  its  own  value,  which 
it  has  by  itself,  even  if  you  die.  That  is  just 
why  one  may  be  ready  to  die  for  his  cause.  In 
any  case,  when  the  loyal  man  serves  his  cause, 
he  is  not  seeking  his  own  private  advantage. 

19 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

Moreover,  the  cause  to  which  a  loyal  man  is 
devoted  is  never  something  wholly  impersonal, 
v/  It  concerns  other  men.  Loyalty  is  social.  If 
one  is  a  loyal  servant  of  a  cause,  one  has  at 
least  possible  fellow-servants.  On  the  other 
hand,  since  a  cause,  in  general,  tends  to  unite 
the  many  fellow-servants  in  one  service,  it  con- 
sequently seems  to  the  loyal  man  to  have  a 
sort  of  impersonal  or  superpersonal  quality 
about  it.  You  can  love  an  individual.  But 
you  can  be  loyal  only  to  a  tie  that  binds  you 
and  others  into  some  sort  of  unity,  and  loyal 
to  individuals  only  through  the  tie.  The 
cause  to  which  loyalty  devotes  itself  has  always 
this  union  of  the  personal  and  the  seemingly 
superindividual  about  it.  It  binds  many  indi- 
viduals into  one  service.  Loyal  lovers,  for 
instance,  are  loyal  not  merely  to  one  another 
as  separate  individuals,  but  to  their  love,  to 
their  union,  which  is  something  more  than 
either  of  them,  or  even  than  both  of  them 
viewed  as  distinct  individuals. 

So  much  for  a  preliminary  view  of  what 
loyalty   is.     Our  definition   is   not   complete. 

20 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

It  raises  rather  than  solves  problems  about  the 
nature  of  loyalty.  But  thus  indeed  we  get  a 
first  notion  of  the  general  nature  of  loyalty. 

.     iv 

But  now  for  a  next  step.  Many  people  find 
that  they  have  a  need  of  loyalty.  Loyalty  is  ^^ 
a  good  thing  for  them.  If  you  ask,  however,  j^r.^ 
why  loyalty  may  be  needed  by  a  given  man, 
the  answer  may  be  very  complex.  A  patriot 
may,  in  your  opinion,  need  loyalty,  first  because 
his  country  needs  his  service,  and,  as  you  add, 
he  actually  owes  this  service,  and  so  needs  to 
do  his  duty,  viz.  to  be  loyal.  This  first  way 
of  stating  a  given  man's  need  of  a  given  loyalty, 
turns  upon  asserting  that  a  specific  cause 
rightly  requires  of  a  certain  man  a  certain 
service.  The  cause,  as  one  holds,  is  good 
and  worthy.  This  man  actually  ought  to 
serve  just  that  cause.  Hence  he  stands  in 
need  of  loyalty,  and  of  just  this  loyalty. 

But  in  order  thus  to  define  this  man's  need 
of  loyalty,  you  have  to  determine  what  causes 
are  worthy  of  loyalty,  and  why  this  man  ought 

21 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

to  serve  his  own  cause.  To  answer  such  ques- 
tions would  apparently  presuppose  a  whole 
system  of  morals,  — a  system  which  at  this 
stage  of  our  argument  we  have  not  yet  in  sight. 
But  there  is  another,  — a  simpler,  and,  at 
the  outset,  a  lower  way  of  estimating  the  value 
of  loyalty.  One  may,  for  the  time,  abstract 
from  all  questions  as  to  the  value  of  causes. 
Whether  a  man  is  loyal  to  a  good  cause  or  to 
a  bad  cause,  his  own  personal  attitude,  when 
he  is  loyal,  has  a  certain  general  quality. 
Whoever  is  loyal,  i^jjatever  be  his  cause,  is 
devoted,  is  active,  surrenders  his  private  self- 
will,  controls  himself,  is  in  love  with  his  cause, 
and  believes  in  it.  The  loyal  man  is  thus  in 
a  certain  state  of  mind  which  has  its  own  value 
for  himself.  To  live  a  loyal  life,  whatever  be 
one's  cause,  is  to  live  in  a  way  which  is  certainly 
free  from  many  well-known  sources  of  inner, 
dissatisfaction.  Thus  hesitancy  is  often  cor- 
rected by  loyalty;  for  the  cause  plainly  tells 
the  loyal  man  what  to  do.  Loyalty,  again, 
tends  to  unify  life,  to  give  it  centre,  fixity, 
stability. 

22 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

Well,  these  aspects  of  loyalty  are,  so  far 
as  they  go,  good  for  the  loyal  man.  We  may 
therefore  define  our  need  of  loyalty  in  a 
certain  preliminary  way.  We  may  take  what 
is  indeed  a  lower  view  of  loyalty,  regarding 
it,  for  the  moment,  in  deliberate  abstraction 
from  the  cause  to  which  one  is  loyal.  We 
may  thus  regard  loyalty,  for  the  moment, 
just  as  a  personal  attitude,  which  is  good  for 
the  loyal  man  himself. 

Now  this  lower  view  of  our  need  of  loyalty 
is  the  one  to  which  in  the  rest  of  this  lecture  I 
want  you  to  attend.  All  that  I  now  say  is 
preliminary.  Results  belong  later.  Let  us 
simply  abstract  from  the  question  whether  a 
man's  cause  is  objectively  worthy  of  his  loyalty 
or  not.  Let  lis  ask :  What  does  a  man  gain 
by  being  loyal?  Suppose  that  some  cause, 
outside  of  and  also  inclusive  of  his  private 
self,  so  appeals  to  a  man  that  he  believes  it  to 
be  worthy,  and  becomes  heartily  loyal  to  it. 
What  good  does  he  get  personally  out  of  his 
loyalty?  In  order  to  answer  this  question, 
even  in  this  preliminary  way,  I  must  indeed  go 

23 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

rather  far  afield,  and  define  for  you,  still  very 
tentatively,  one  of  the  best-known  and  hardest 
of  the  problems  of  our  personal  life. 


What  do  we  live  for?  What  is  our  duty? 
What  is  the  true  ideal  of  life?  What  is  the 
true  difference  between  right  and  wrong? 
What  is  the  true  good  which  we  all  need? 
Whoever  begins  seriously  to  consider  such 
questions  as  these  soon  observes  certain  great 
truths  about  the  moral  life  which  he  must  take 
into  account  if  his  enterprise  is  to  succeed, 
that  is,  if  he  is  ever  to  answer  these  questions. 

The  first  truth  is  this :  We  all  of  us  first 
learned  about  what  we  ought  to  do,  about 
what  our  ideal  should  be,  and  in  general  about 
the  moral  law,  through  some  authority  external 
to  our  own  wills.  Our  teachers,  our  parents, 
our  playmates,  society,  custom,  or  perhaps 
some  church,  — these  taught  us  about  one 
or  another  aspect  of  right  and  wrong.  The 
moral    law    came    to    us   from    without.      It 

24 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

often  seemed  to  us,  in  so  far,  something  other 
than  our  will,  something  threatening  or  socially 
compelling,  or  externally  restraining.  In  so 
far  as  our  moral  training  is  still  incomplete, 
the  moral  law  may  at  any  moment  have  to 
assume  afresh  this  air  of  an  external  authority 
merely  in  order  to  win  our  due  attention.  But 
if  we  have  learned  the  moral  law,  or  any  part 
of  it,  and  if  we  do  not  ask  any  longer  how  we 
first  learned,  or  how  we  may  still  have  to  learn 
afresh  our  duty,  but  if,  on  the  contrary,  we 
rather  ask:  "What  reason  can  I  now  give  to 
myself  why  a  given  act  is  truly  right  ?  What 
reason  can  I  give  why  my  duty  is  my  duty?" 
—  then,  indeed,  we  find  that  no  external  au- 
thority, viewed  merely  as  external,  can  give 
one  any  reason  why  an  act  is  truly  right  or 
wrong.  Only  a  calm  and  reasonable  view  of 
what  it  is  that  I  myself  really  will,  — only 
this  can  decide  such  a  question.  My  duty  is 
simply  my  own  will  brought  to  my  clear  self- 
consciousness.  That  which  I  can  rightly  view 
as  good  for  me  is  simply  the  object  of  my  own 
deepest  desire  set  plainly  before  my  insight. 

25 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

For  your  own  will  and  your  own  desire,  once 
fully  brought  to  self -consciousness,  furnish  the 
only  valid  reason  for  you  to  know  what  is 
right  and  good. 

This  comment  which  I  now  make  upon  the 
nature  of  the  moral  law  is  familiar  to  every 
serious  student  of  ethics.  In  one  form  or 
another  this  fact,  that  the  ultimate  moral  au- 
thority for  each  of  us  is  determined  by  our  own 
rational  will,  is  admitted  even  by  apparently 
extreme  partisans  of  authority.  Socrates  long 
ago  announced  the  principle  in  question  when 
he  taught  that  no  man  is  willingly  base.  Plato 
and  Aristotle  employed  it  in  developing  their 
ethical  doctrines.  When  St.  Augustine,  in  a 
familiar  passage  in  his  Confessions,  regards 
God's  will  as  that  in  which,  and  in  which  alone, 
our  wills  can  find  rest  and  peace,  he  indeed 
makes  God's  will  the  rule  of  life ;  but  he  also 
shows  that  the  reason  why  each  of  us,  if  en- 
lightened, recognizes  the  divine  will  as  right, 
is  that,  in  Augustine's  opinion,  God  has  so 
made  us  for  himself  that  our  own  wills  are  by 
nature  inwardly  restless  until  they  rest  in  har- 

m 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

mony  with  God's  will.  Our  restlessness,  then, 
so  long  as  we  are  out  of  this  harmony,  gives 
us  the  reason  why  we  find  it  right,  if  we  are 
enlightened,  to  surrender  our  self-will. 

If  you  want  to  find  out,  then,  what  is  right 
and  what  is  good  for  you,  bring  your  own  will 
to  self -consciousness.  Your  duty  is  what  you 
yourself  will  to  do  in  so  far  as  you  clearly  dis- 
cover who  you  are,  and  what  your  place  in  the 
world  is.  This  is,  indeed,  a  first  principle  of 
all  ethical  inquiry.  Kant  called  it  the  Prin- 
ciple of  the  Autonomy  or  self -direction  of  the 
rational  will  of  each  moral  being. 

But  now  there  stands  beside  this  first  prin- 
ciple a  second  principle,  equally  inevitable  and 
equally  important.  This  principle  is,  that  I 
can  never  find  out  what  my  own  will  is  by 
merely  brooding  over  my  natural  desires,  or 
by  following  my  momentary  caprices.  For  by 
nature  I  am  a  sort  of  meeting  place  of  count- 
less streams  of  ancestral  tendency.  From 
moment  to  moment,  if  you  consider  me  apart 
from  my  training,  I  am  a  collection  of  im- 
pulses.    There  is  no  one  desire  that  is  always 

27 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

present  to  me.     Left  to  myself  alone,  I  can 
never  find  out  what  my  will  is. 

You  may  interpose  here  the  familiar  thesis 
that  there  is  one  desire  which  I  always  have, 
namely,  the  desire  to  escape  from  pain  and  to 
get  pleasure.  But  as  soon  as  you  try  to  ad- 
just this  thesis  to  the  facts  of  life,  it  is  a  thesis 
which  simplifies  nothing,  and  which  at  best 
simply  gives  me  back  again,  under  new  names, 
that  chaos  of  conflicting  passions  and  in- 
terests which  constitutes,  apart  from  training, 
my  natural  life.  What  we  naturally  desire 
is  determined  for  us  by  our  countless  instincts 
and  by  whatever  training  they  have  received. 
We  want  to  breathe,  to  eat,  to  walk,  to  run, 
to  speak,  to  see,  to  hear,  to  love,  to  fight,  and, 
amongst  other  things,  we  want  to  be  more  or 
less  reasonable.  Now,  if  one  of  these  instinc- 
tive wants  of  ours  drives  us  at  any  moment 
to  action,  we  normally  take  pleasure  in  such 
action,  in  so  far  as  it  succeeds.  For  action 
in  accordance  with  desire  means  relief  from 
tension ;  and  that  is  usually  accompanied  with 
pleasure.     On    the    other   hand,    a   thwarted 

28 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

activity  gives  us  pain.  But  only  under  special 
circumstances  does  this  resulting  pleasure  or 
pain  of  the  successful  or  of  the  hindered  activ- 
ity come  to  constitute  a  principal  object  of  our 
desire.  jWe  all  do  like  pleasure,  and  we  all 
do  shun  pain.  J  But  a  great  deal  of  what  we 
desire  is  desired  by  instinct,  apart  from  the 
memory  or  the  expectation  of  pleasure  and 
pain,  and  often  counter  to  the  warnings  that 
pleasure  and  pain  have  given  to  us.  It  is 
normal  to  desire  food  because  one  is  hungry, 
rather  than  because  one  loves  the  pleasures  of 
the  table.  It  is  water  that  the  thirsty  man 
in  the  desert  longs  for,  rather  than  pleasure, 
and  rather  than  even  mere  relief  from  pain  as 
such.  For  much  of  the  pain  appears  to  his 
consciousness  as  largely  due  to  his  longing  for 
water.  Pain,  then,  is  indeed  an  evil,  but  it  is 
in  part  secondary  to  thwarted  desire;  while, 
when  pain  appears  as  a  brute  fact  of  our 
feelings,  which  we  indeed  hate,  such  pain  is 
even  then  only  one  amongst  the  many  ills  of 
life,  only  one  of  the  many  undesirable  objects. 
The    burnt    child,    indeed,    dreads    the    fire; 

29 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

but  the  climbing  child,  instinctively  loving  the 
ways  of  his  remote  arboreal  ancestors,  is  little 
deterred  by  the  pain  of  an  occasional  fall. 

Furthermore,  if  I  even  admitted  that  I 
always  desire  pleasure  and  relief  from  pain, 
and  nothing  else,  I  should  not  learn  from  such 
a  principle  what  it  is  that,  on  the  whole,  I 
am  to  will  to  do,  in  order  to  express  my  desire 
for  pleasure,  and  in  order  to.  escape  from 
pain.  For  no  art  is  harder  than  the  art  of 
pleasure  seeking.  I  can  never  learn  that  art 
alone  by  myself.  And  so  I  cannot  define  my 
own  will,  and  hence  cannot  define  my  duty, 
merely  in  terms  of  pleasure  and  pain. 


VI 


So  far,  then,  we  have  a  rather  paradoxical 
situation  before  us.  Yet  it  is  the  moral  situa- 
tion of  every  one  of  us.  If  I  am  to  know  my 
duty,  I  must  consult  my  own  reasonable  will. 
I  alone  can  show  myself  why  I  view  this  or  this 
as  my  duty.  But  on  the  other  hand,  if  I 
merely  look  within  myself  to  find  what  it  is 

30 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

that  I  will,  my  own  private  individual  nature, 
apart  from  due  training,  never  gives  me  any 
answer  to  the  question :  What  do  I  will  ? 
By  nature  I  am  a  victim  of  my  ancestry,  a 
mass  of  world-old  passions  and  impulses,  de- 
siring and  suffering  in  constantly  new  ways  as 
my  circumstances  change,  and  as  one  or  an- 
other of  my  natural  impulses  comes  to  the 
front.  By  nature,  then,  apart  from  a  specific 
training,  I  have  no  personal  will  of  my  own. 
One  of  the  principal  tasks  of  my  life  is  to  learn 
to  have  a  will  of  my  own.  To  learn  your  own 
will,  — yes,  to  create  your  own  will,  is  one  of 
the  largest  of  your  human  undertakings. 

Here,  then,  as  the  paradox.  I,  and  only  I, 
whenever  I  come  to  my  own,  can  morally 
justify  to  myself  my  own  plan  of  life.  No 
outer  ^authority  can  ever  give  me  the  true  rea- 
son for  my  duty:  Yet  I,  left  to  myself,  can 
never  find  a  plan  of*  life.  I  have  no  inborn 
ideal  naturally  preserrt  within  myself.  By 
nature  I  simply  go  on  crying  out  in  a  sort  of 
chaotic  self-will,  according  as  the  momentary 
play  of  desire  determines.. 

31 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

Whence,  then,  can  I  learn  any  plan  of  life  ? 
The  moral  education  of  any  civilized  person 
easily  reminds  you  how  this  question  is,  in 
one  respect,  very  partially,  but,  so  far  as 
ordinary  training  goes,  constantly  answered. 
j.  One  gets  one's  various  plans  of  life  suggested 
'j  through  the  models  that  are  set  before  each 
one  of  us  by  his  fellows.  Plans  of  life  first 
come  to  us  in  connection  with  our  endless 
imitative  activities.  These  imitative  pro- 
cesses begin  in  our  infancy,  and  run  on 
through  our  whole .  life.  We  learn  to  play, 
to  speak,  to  enter  into  our  social  realm,  to 
take  part  in  the  ways  and  so  in  the  life  of 
mankind.  This  imitative  social  activity  is 
itself  due  to  our  instincts  as  social  beings. 
But  in  turn  the  social  activities  are  the  ones 
that  first  tend  to  organize  all  of  our  instincts, 
to  give  unity  to  our  passions  and  impulses, 
to  transform  our  natural  chaos  of  desires 
into  some  sort  of  order  — usually,  indeed,  a 
very  imperfect  order.  It  is  our  social  exist- 
ence, then,  as  imitative  beings,  — it  is  this 
that  suggests  to  us  the  sorts  of  plans  of  life 

32 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

which  we  get  when  we  learn  a  calling,  when 
we  find  a  business  in  life,  when  we  discover 
our  place  in  the  social  world.  And  so  our 
actual  plans  of  life,  namely,  our  callings, 
our  more  or  less  settled  daily  activities,  come 
to  us  from  without.  We  in  so  far  learn  what 
our  own  will  is  by  first  imitating  the  wills  of 
others. 

Yet  no,  — this,  once  more,  is  never  the 
whole  truth  about  our  social  situation,  and  is 
still  less  the  whole  truth  about  our  moral 
situation.  By  ourselves  alone,  we  have  said, 
we  can  never  discover  in  our  own  inner  life 
any  one  plan  of  life  that  expresses  our  genuine 
will.  So  then,  we  have  said,  all  of  our  plans 
get  suggested  to  us  by  the  social  order  in 
which  we  grow  up.  But  on  the  other  hand, 
our  social  training  gives  us  a  mass  of  varying 
plans  of  life,  — plans  that  are  not  utterly 
chaotic,  indeed,  but  imperfectly  ordered,  — 
mere  routine,  not  ideal  life.  Moreover,  social 
training  tends  not  only  to  teach  us  the  way  of 
other  people,  but  to  heighten  by  contrast  our 
vague    natural    sense    of    the    importance    of 

D  33 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

having  our  own  way.  Social  training  stimu- 
lates the  will  of  the  individual  self,  and  also 
teaches  this  self  customs  and  devices  for 
self-expression.  We  never  merely  imitate. 
Conformity  attracts,  but  also  wearies  us. 
Meanwhile,  even  by  imitation,  we  often  learn 
how  to  possess,  and  then  to  carry  out,  our 
own  self-will.  For  instance,  we  learn  speech 
first  by  imitation;  but  henceforth  we  love  to 
j  hear  ourselves  talk;  and  our  whole  plan  of 
life  gets  affected  accordingly.  Speech  has, 
indeed,  its  origin  in  social  conformity.  Yet 
the  tongue  is  an  unruly  member,  and  wags 
rebelliously.  Teach  men  customs,  and  you 
equip  them  with  weapons  for  expressing  their 
own  personalities.  As  you  train  the  social 
being,  you  make  use  of  his  natural  submis- 
siveness.  But  as  a  result  of  your  training  he 
forms  plans ;  he  interprets  these  plans  with 
reference  to  his  own  personal  interests ;  he 
becomes  aware  who  he  is ;  and  he  may  end 
by  becoming,  if  not  original,  then  at  least 
obstreperous.  And  thus  society  is  con- 
stantly engaged  in  training  up  children  who 

34 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

may,  and  often  do,  rebel  against  their  mother. 
\Social  conformity  gives  us  social  power] 
Such  power  brings  to  us  a  consciousness  of 
who  and  what  we  are.  Now,  for  the  first 
time,  we  begin  to  have  a  real  will  of  our  own. 
And  hereupon  we  may  discover  this  will  to 
be  in  sharp  conflict  with  the  will  of  society. 
This  is  what  normally  happens  to  most  of  us, 
for  a  time  at  least,  in  youth. 
\  You  see,  so  far,  how  the  whole  process 
upon  which  man's  moral  life  depends  in- 
volves this  seemingly  endless  play  of  inner 
and  outer.  How  shall  my  duty  be  defined? 
Only  by  my  own  will,  whenever  that  will  is 
brought  to  rational  self -consciousness.  But 
what  is  my  will  ?  By  nature  I  know  not ; 
for  by  birth  I  am  a  mere  eddy  in  the  turbulent 
stream  of  inherited  human  passion.  How, 
then,  shall  I  get  a  will  of  my  own?  Only 
through  social  training.  That  indeed  gives 
me  plans,  for  it  teaches  me  the  settled  ways 
of  my  world.  Yet  no,  — for  such  training 
really  teaches  me  rather  the  arts  whereby  I 
may   express    myself.     It   makes    me    clever, 

35 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

ambitious,  often  rebellious,  and  in  so  far  it 
teaches  me  how  to  plan  opposition  to  the 
social  order.  The  circular  process  thus 
briefly  indicated  goes  on  throughout  the  lives 
of  many  of  us.  It  appears  in  new  forms  at 
various  stages  of  our  growth.  At  any  mo- 
ment we  may  meet  new  problems  of  right 
and  wrong,  relating  to  our  plans  of  life.  We 
hereupon  look  within-,  at  what  we  call  our  own 
conscience,  to  find  out  what  our  duty  is. 
But,  as  we  do  so,  we  discover,  too  often,  what 
wayward  and  blind  guides  our  own  hearts  so 
far  are.  So  we  look  without,  in  order  to  un- 
derstand better  the  ways  of  the  social  world. 
We  cannot  see  the  inner  light.  Let  us  try  the 
outer  one.  These  ways  of  the  world  appeal 
to  our  imitativeness,  and  so  we  learn  from 
the  other  people  how  we  ourselves  are  in  this 
case  to  live.  Yet  no,  — this  very  learning 
often  makes  us  aware  of  our  personal  contrast 
with  other  people,  and  so  makes  us  self-con- 
scious, individualistic,  critical,  rebellious;  and 
again  we  are  thrown  back  on  ourselves  for 
guidance.     Seeing  the  world's  way  afresh,  I 

36 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

see  that  it  is  not  my  way.  I  revive.  I  assert 
myself.  My  duty,  I  say,  is  my  own.  And 
so,  perhaps,  I  go  back  again  to  my  own  way- 
ward heart. 

It  is  this  sort  of  process  which  goes  on, 
sometimes  in  a  hopelessly  circular  way,  when, 
in  some  complicated  situation,  you  are  mor- 
ally perplexed,  and  after  much  inner  brood- 
ing give  up  deciding  by  yourself  and  appeal 
to  friends  for  advice.  The  advice  at  first 
pleases  you,  but  soon  may  arouse  your  self- 
will  more  than  before.  You  may  become, 
as  a  result,  more  wayward  and  sometimes 
more  perplexed,  the  longer  you  continue 
this  sort  of  inquiry.  We  all  know  what  it  is 
to  seek  advice,  just  with  the  result  of  finding 
out  what  it  is  that  we  do  not  want  to  do. 

Neither  within  nor  without,  then,  do  I  find 
what  seems  to  me  a  settled  authority,  — a 
settled  and  harmonious  plan  of  life,  — unless, 
indeed,  one  happy  sort  of  union  takes  place 
between  the  inner  and  the  outer,  between  my 
social  world  and  myself,  between  my  natural 
waywardness    and   the   ways    of   my   fellows. 

37 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

This  happy  union  is  the  one  that  takes  place 
whenever  my  mere  social  conformity,  my 
docility  as  an  imitative  creature,  turns  into 
exactly  that  which,  in  these  lectures,  I  shali 
call  loyalty.  Let  us  consider  what  happens 
in  such  cases. 

VII 

Suppose  a  being  whose  social  conformity 
has  been  sufficient  to  enable  him  to  learn 
many  skilful  social  arts,  — arts  of  speech,  of 
prowess  in  contest,  of  influence  over  other 
men.  Suppose  that  these  arts  have  at  the 
same  time  awakened  this  man's  pride,  his 
self-confidence,  his  disposition  to  assert  him- 
self. Such  a  man  will  have  in  him  a  good 
deal  of  what  you  can  well  call  social  will. 
He  will  be  no  mere  anarchist.  He  will  have 
been  trained  into  much  obedience.  He  will 
be  no  natural  enemy  of  society,  unless,  indeed, 
fortune  has  given  him  extraordinary  oppor- 
tunities to  win  his  way  without  scruples.  On 
the  other  hand,  this  man  must  acquire  a  good 
deal  of  self-will.     He  becomes  fond  of  success, 

38 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

of  mastery,  of  his  own  demands.  To  be  sure, 
he  can  find  within  himself  no  one  naturally 
sovereign  will.  He  can  so  far  find  only  a 
general  determination  to  define  some  way  of 
his  own,  and  to  have  his  own  way.  Hence 
the  conflicts  of  social  will  and  self-will  are 
inevitable,  circular,  endless,  so  long  as  this  is 
the  whole  story  of  the  man's  life.  By  merely 
consulting  convention,  on  the  one  hand,  and 
his  disposition  to  be  somebody,  on  the  other 
hand,  this  man  can  never  find  any  one  final 
and  consistent  plan  of  life,  nor  reach  any  one 
definition  of  his  duty. 

But  now  suppose  that  there  appears  in  this 
man's  life  some  one  of  the  greater  social  pas- 
sions, such  as  patriotism  well  exemplifies. 
Let  his  country  be  in  danger.  Let  his  ele- 
mental passion  for  conflict  hereupon  fuse 
with  his  brotherly  love  for  his  own  country- 
men into  that  fascinating  and  blood-thirsty 
form  of  humane  but  furious  ecstasy,  which  is 
called  the  war-spirit.  The  mood  in  question 
may  or  may  not  be  justified  by  the  passing 
circumstances.     For  that  I  now  care  not.     At 

39 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

its  best  the  war-spirit  is  no  very  clear  or  ra- 
tional state  of  anybody's  mind.  But  one 
reason  why  men  may  love  this  spirit  is  that 
when  it  comes,  it  seems  at  once  to  define  a 
plan  of  life,  — a  plan  which  solves  the  con- 
flicts of  self-will  and  conformity.  This  plan 
has  two  features:  (1)  it  is  through  and 
through  a  social  plan,  obedient  to  the  gen- 
eral will  of  one's  country,  submissive;  (2)  it 
is  through  and  through  an  exaltation  of  the 
self,  of  the  inner  man,  who  now  feels  glori- 
fied through  his  sacrifice,  dignified  in  his  self- 
surrender,  glad  to  be  his  country's  servant 
and  martyr,  —  yet  sure  that  through  this  very 
readiness  for  self-destruction  he  wins  the 
rank  of  hero. 

Well,  if  the  man  whose  case  we  are  suppos- 
ing gets  possessed  by  some  such  passion  as 
this,  he  wins  for  the  moment  the  conscious- 
ness of  what  I  call  loyalty.  This  loyalty  no 
longer  knows  anything  about  the  old  circular 
conflicts  of  self-will  and  of  conformity.  The 
self,  at  such  moments,  looks  indeed  outwards 
for  its  plan  of  life.     "The  country  needs  me," 

40 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

it  says.  It  looks,  meanwhile,  inwards  for 
the  inspiring  justification  of  this  plan. 
"Honor,  the  hero's  crown,  the  soldier's  death, 
the  patriot's  devotion — these,"  it  says,  "are 
my  will.  I  am  not  giving  up  this  will  of 
mine.  It  is  my  pride,  my  glory,  my  self- 
assertion,  to  be  ready  at  my  country's  call." 
And  now  there  is  no  conflict  of  outer  and 
inner. 

How  wise  or  how  enduring  or  how  prac- 
tical such  a  passion  may  prove,  I  do  not 
yet  consider.  What  I  point  out  is  that  this 
war-spirit,  for  the  time  at  least,  makes  self- 
sacrifice  seem  to  be  self-expression,  makes 
obedience  to  the  country's  call  seem  to  be 
the  proudest  sort  of  display  of  one's  own  pow- 
ers. Honor  now  means  submission,  and  to 
obey  means  to  have  one's  way.  Power  and 
service  are  at  one.  Conformity  is  no  longer  i/*  *) 
opposed  to  having  one's  own  will.  One  has 
no  will  but  that  of  the  country. 

As  a  mere  fact  of  human  nature,  then,  there 
are  social  passions  which  actually  tend  to  do 
at  once  two  things:    (1)  to  intensify  our  self- 

41 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

consciousness,  to  make  us  more  than  ever 
determined  to  express  our  own  will  and  more 
than  ever  sure  of  our  own  rights,  of  our  own 
strength,  of  our  dignity,  of  our  power,  of  our 
value;  (2)  to  make  obvious  to  us  that  this 
our  will  has  no  purpose  but  to  do  the  will  of 
some  fascinating  social  power.  This  social 
power  is  the  cause  to  which  we  are  loyal. 

Loyalty,  then,  fixes  our  attention  upon  some 
one  cause,  bids  us  look  without  ourselves  to 
see  what  this  unified  cause  is,  shows  us  thus 
some  one  plan  of  action,  and  then  says  to  us, 
"In  this  cause  is  your  life,  your  will,  your 
opportunity,  your  fulfilment." 

Thus  loyalty,  viewed  merely  as  a  personal 
attitude,  solves  the  paradox  of  our  ordinary 
existence,  by  showing  us  outside  of  ourselves 
the  cause  which  is  to  be  served,  and  inside  of 
ourselves  the  will  which  delights  to  do  this 
service,  and  which  is  not  thwarted  but  en- 
riched and  expressed  in  such  service. 

I  have  used  patriotism  and  the  war-spirit 
merely  as  a  first  and  familiar  illustration  of 
loyalty.     But  now,  as  we  shall  later  see,  there 

42 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

is  no  necessary  connection  between  loyalty 
and  war ;  and  there  are  many  other  forms  of 
loyalty  besides  the  patriotic  forms.  Loyalty 
has  its  domestic,  its  religious,  its  commercial, 
its  professional  forms,  and  many  other  forms 
as  well.  The  essence  of  it,  whatever  forms 
it  may  take,  is,  as  I  conceive  the  matter,  this : 
Since  no  man  can  find  a  plan  of  life  by  merely  « 
looking  within  his  own  chaotic  nature,  he  has 
to  look  without,  to  the  world  of  social  conven-  \ 
tions,  deeds,  and  causes.  Now,  a  loyal  man 
is  one  who  has  found,  and  who  sees,  neither  * 
mere  individual  fellow-men  to  be  loved  or 
hated,  nor  mere  conventions,  nor  customs, 
nor  laws  to  be  obeyed,  but  some  social  cause, 
or  some  system  of  causes,  so  rich,  so  well  knit, 
and,  to  him,  so  fascinating,  and  withal  so 
kindly  in  its  appeal  to  his  natural  self-will, 
that  he  says  to  his  cause:  "Thy  will  is  mine 
and  mine  is  thine.  In  thee  I  do  not  lose  but 
find  myself,  living  intensely  in  proportion  as 
I  live  for  thee."  If  one  could  find  such  a 
cause,  and  hold  it  for  his  lifetime  before  his 
mind,  clearly  observing  it,  passionately  loving 

43 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

it,  and  yet  calmly  understanding  it,  and  stead- 
ily and  practically  serving  it,  he  would  have 
one  plan  of  life,  and  this  plan  of  life  would 
be  his  own  plan,  his  own  will  set  before  him, 
expressing  all  that  his  self-will  has  ever  sought. 
Yet  this  plan  would  also  be  a  plan  of  obedience, 
because  it  would  mean  living  for  the  cause. 

Now,  in  all  ages  of  civilized  life  there  have 
been  people  who  have  won  in  some  form  a 
consciousness  of  loyalty,  and  who  have  held 
to  such  a  consciousness  through  life.  Such 
people  may  or  may  not  have  been  right  in 
their  choice  of  a  cause.  But  at  least  they  have 
exemplified  through  their  loyalty  one  feature  of 
a  rational  moral  life.  They  have  known  what 
it  was  to  have  unity  of  purpose. 

And  again,  the  loyal  have  known  what  it 
was  to  be  free  from  moral  doubts  and  scruples. 
Their  cause  has  been  their  conscience.  It 
has  told  them  what  to  do.  They  have  lis- 
tened and  obeyed,  not  because  of  what  they 
took  to  be  blind  convention,  not  because  of  a 
fear  of  external  authority,  no£  even  because  of 
what  seemed  to  themselves   any   purely   pri- 

44 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

vate  and  personal  intuition,  but  because, 
when  they  have  looked  first  outwards  at  their 
cause,  and  then  inwards  at  themselves,  they 
have  found  themselves  worthless  in  their  own 
eyes,  except  when  viewed  as  active,  as  confi- 
dently devoted,  as  willing  instruments  of 
their  cause.  Their  cause  has  forbidden  them 
to  doubt;  it  has  said:  "You  are  mine,  you 
cannot  do  otherwise."  And  they  have  said 
to  the  cause:  "I  am,  even  of  my  own  will, 
thine.  I  have  no  will  except  thy  will.  Take 
me,  use  me,  control  me,  and  even  thereby 
fulfil  me  and  exalt  me."  That  is  again  the 
speech  of  the  devoted  patriots,  soldiers,  moth- 
ers, and  martyrs  of  our  race.  They  have  had 
the  grace  of  this  willing,  this  active  loyalty. 

Now,  people  loyal  in  this  sense  have  surely 
existed  in  the  world,  and,  as  you  all  know,  the 
loyal  still  exist  amongst  us.  And  I  beg  you 
not  to  object  to  me,  at  this  point,  that  such 
devoted  people  have  often  been  loyal  to  very 
bad  causes;  or  that  different  people  have 
been  loyal  to  causes  which  were  in  deadly  war 
with  one  another,  so  that  loyal  people  must 

45 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

often  have  been  falsely  guided.  I  beg  you, 
above  all,  not  to  interpose  here  the  objection 
that  our  modern  doubters  concerning  moral 
problems  simply  cannot  at  present  see  to 
what  one  cause  they  ought  to  be  loyal,  so  that 
just  herein,  just  in  our  inability  to  see  a  fitting 
and  central  object  of  loyalty,  lies  the  root  of 
our  modern  moral  confusion  and  distraction. 
All  those  possible  objections  are  indeed  per- 
fectly fair  considerations.  I  shall  deal  with 
them  in  due  time ;  and  I  am  just  as  earnestly 
aware  of  them  as  you  can  be.  But  just  now 
we  are  getting  our  first  glimpse  of  our  future 
philosophy  of  loyalty.  All  that  you  can  say 
of  the  defects  of  loyalty  leaves  still  untouched 
the  one  great  fact  that,  if  you  want  to  find 
a  way  of  living  which  surmounts  doubts,  and 
centralizes  your  powers,  it  must  be  some  such 
a  way  as  all  the  loyal  in  common  have  trodden, 
since  first  loyalty  was  known  amongst  men. 
What  form  of  loyalty  is  the  right  one,  we  are 
hereafter  to  see.  But  unless  you  can  find 
some  sort  of  loyalty,  you  cannot  find  unity 
*    and  peace  in  your  active  living.     You  must 

46 


NATURE  AND  NEED  OF  LOYALTY 

find,  then,  a  cause  that  is  really  worthy  of  the 
sort  of  devotion  that  the  soldiers,  rushing 
cheerfully  to  certain  death,  have  felt  for 
their  clan  or  for  their  country,  and  that  the 
martyrs  have  shown  on  behalf  of  their  faith. 
This  cause  must  be  indeed  rational,  worthy, 
and  no  object  of  a  false  devotion.  But  once 
found,  it  must  become  your  conscience,  must 
tell  you  the  truth  about  your  duty,  and  must 
unify,  as  from  without  and  from  above,  your 
motives,  your  special  ideals,  and  your  plans. 
You  ought,  I  say,  to  find  such  a  cause,  if  in- 
deed there  be  any  ought  at  all.  And  this 
is  my  first  hint  of  our  moral  code. 

But  you  repeat,  perhaps  in  bewilderment, 
your  question:  "Where,  in  our  distracted 
modern  world,  in  this  time  when  cause  wars 
with  cause,  and  when  all  old  moral  standards 
are  remorselessly  criticised  and  doubted,  are 
we  to  find  such  a  cause  —  a  cause,  all-embrac- 
ing, definite,  rationally  compelling,  supreme, 
certain,  and  fit  to  centralize  life?  What 
cause  is  there  that  for  us  would  rationally 
justify  a  martyr's  devotion?"     I  reply:    "A 

47 


THE  PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

perfectly  simple  consideration,  derived  from 
a  study  of  the  very  spirit  of  loyalty  itself,  as 
this  spirit  is  manifested  by  all  the  loyal,  will 
soon  furnish  to  us  the  unmistakable  answer 
to  this  question."  For  the  moment  we  have 
won  our  first  distant  glimpse  of  what  I  mean 
by  the  general  nature  of  loyalty,  and  by  our 
common  need  of  loyalty. 


II 

INDIVIDUALISM 


LECTURE  II 

INDIVIDUALISM 

IN  my  opening  lecture  I  undertook  to 
define  the  personal  attitude  which  I 
called  loyalty,  and  to  show  that,  for  our  own 
individual  good,  we  all  need  loyalty,  and  need 
to  find  causes  to  which  we  can  be  loyal.  This 
was  but  the  beginning  of  our  philosophy  of 
loyalty.  Before  I  take  my  next  step,  I  must 
ask  you  briefly  to  review  the  results  that  we 
have  already  reached. 


By  loyalty,  as  you  remember,  I  mean  in  this 
preliminary  view  of  loyalty,  the  willing  and 
practical  and  thoroughgoing  devotion  of  a 
person  to  a  cause.  By  a  cause  that  is  adapted 
to  call  forth  loyalty  I  mean,  for  the  first, 
something  which  seems  to  the  loyal  person 
to  be  larger  than  his  private  self,  and  so  to  be, 
in   some  respect,   external   to  his   purely  in- 

51 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

dividual  will.  This  cause  must,  in  the  second 
place,  unite  him  with  other  persons  by  some 
social  tie,  such  as  a  personal  friendship,  or 
his  family,  or  the  state  may,  in  a  given  case, 
represent.  The  cause,  therefore,  to  which 
the  loyal  man  is  devoted,  is  something  that 
appears  to  him  to  be  at  once  personal  (since 
it  concerns  both  himself  and  other  people), 
and  impersonal,  or  rather,  if  regarded  from 
a  purely  human  point  of  view,  superpersonal, 
because  it  links  several  human  selves,  perhaps 
a  vast  number  of  selves,  into  some  higher 
social  unity.  You  cannot  be  loyal  to  a  merely 
impersonal  abstraction;  and  you  also  cannot 
be  loyal  simply  to  a  collection  of  various  sepa- 
rate persons,  viewed  merely  as  a  collection. 
Where  there  is  an  object  of  loyalty,  there  is, 
then,  an  union  of  various  selves  into  one  life. 
This  union  constitutes  a  cause  to  which  one 
may  indeed  be  loyal,  if  such  is  his  disposition. 
And  such  an  union  of  many  in  one,  if  known 
to  anybody  for  whom  a  person  means  merely 
a  human  person,  appears  to  be  something 
impersonal  or  superpersonal,  just  because  it 

52 


INDIVIDUALISM 

is  more  than  all  those  separate  and  private 
personalities  whom  it  joins.  Yet  it  is  also 
intensely  personal,  because  the  union  is  in- 
deed an  union  of  selves,  and  so  not  a  merely 
artificial  abstraction. 

That  such  causes  and  that  a  thoroughgoing, 
willing,  practical  devotion  to  them,  such  as 
our  definition  of  loyalty  demands  — that,  I 
say,  such  things  exist  in  the  world,  I  tried  at 
the  last  time  to  illustrate  to  you.  My  illus- 
trations were  inadequate;  for  it  is  simply 
impossible  to  show  you  briefly  how  Protean 
the  forms  of  human  loyalty  are,  and  yet  how 
similar,  amidst  all  this  endless  variety  of 
forms,  the  spirit  of  loyalty  remains,  whatever 
the  causes  in  question  may  be,  and  whoever 
the  loyal  people  are.  We  began,  of  course, 
with  marked,  traditional,  and  familiar  illus- 
trations. The  loyal  captain,  steadfastly  stand- 
ing by  his  sinking  ship  until  his  last  possible 
duty  for  the  service  to  which  he  belongs  has 
been  accomplished ;  the  loyal  patriot,  eager  to 
devote  every  power  to  living,  and,  if  need  be, 
to    dying    for    his    endangered    country;    the 

53 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

loyal  religious  martyr,  faithful  unto  death,  — 
these  are  indeed  impressive  and  typical  in- 
stances of  loyalty;  but  they  are  not  the  only 
possible  instances.  Anybody  who,  for  a  time, 
is  in  charge  of  the  lives  of  others  (for  instance, 
any  one  who  takes  a  party  of  children  on  a 
pleasure  trip)  may  have  the  opportunity  to 
possess  and  to  show  as  genuine  a  loyalty  as 
does  the  true-hearted  captain  of  the  sinking 
ship.  For  danger  is  everywhere,  and  to  be  in 
charge  of  life  is  always  an  occasion  for  loyalty. 
Anybody  who  has  friends  may  devote  his  life 
to  some  cause  which  his  friendship  defines 
for  him  and  makes,  in  his  eyes,  sacred.  Any- 
body who  has  given  his  word  in  a  serious  mat- 
ter may  come  to  think  himself  called  upon  to 
sacrifice  every  private  advantage  in  order  to 
keep  his  word.  /Thus,  then,  anything  which 
can  link  various  people  by  fixed  social  ties 
may  suggest  to  somebody  the  opportunity  for 
a  lifelong  loyaltj£j  The  loyal  are,  therefore, 
to  be  found  in  all  orders  of  society.  They 
may  be  of  very  various  degrees  of  intelligence, 
of   power,    of   effectiveness.     Wherever   there 

54 


INDIVIDUALISM 

are  mothers  and  brethren,  and  kindred  of 
any  degree,  and  social  organizations  of  any 
type ;  wherever  men  accept  offices,  or  pledge 
xheir  word,  or,  as  in  the  pursuit  of  science  or 
of  art,  cooperate  in  the  search  for  truth  and 
for  beauty,  — there  are  to  be  found  causes 
which  may  appeal  to  the  loyal  interest  of 
somebody.  Loyalty  may  thus  exist  amongst 
the  lowliest  and  amongst  the  loftiest  of  man- 
kind. The  king  and  the  peasant,  the  saint 
and  the  worldling,  all  have  their  various  op- 
portunities for  loyalty.  The  practical  man 
of  the  world  and  the  seemingly  lonely  student 
of  science  may  be  equally  loyal. 

But  whatever  the  cause  to  which  one  is 
loyal,  and  whoever  it  be  that  is  loyal,  the 
spirit  of  loyalty  is  always  the  one  which  our 
preliminary  definition  set  forth,  and  which 
our  former  discussion  attempted  more  pre- 
cisely to  describe.  Whenever  a  cause,  beyond 
your  private  self,  greater  than  you  are,  — a 
cause  social  in  its  nature  and  capable  of  link- 
ing  into  one  the  wills  of  various  individuals, 
a  cause  thus  at  once  personal  and,  from  the 

55 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

purely  human  point  of  view,  superpersonal,  — ■ 
whenever,  I  say,  such  a  cause  so  arouses  your 
interest  that  it  appears  to  you  worthy  to  be 
served  with  all  your  might,  with  all  your  soul, 
with  all  your  strength,  then  this  cause  awakens 
in  you  the  spirit  of  loyalty.  If  you  act  out 
this  spirit,  you  become,  in  fact,  loyal.  And 
upon  the  unity  of  this  spirit,  amidst  all  its 
countless  varieties,  our  future  argument  will 
depend.  It  is  essential  to  that  argument  to 
insist  that  the  humblest,  as  well  as  the  wisest 
and  mightiest  of  men,  may  share  in  this  one 
spirit. 

Now,  loyalty,  thus  defined,  is,  as  we  have 
maintained,  something  which  we  all,  as  hu- 
man beings,  need.  That  is,  we  all  need  to 
find  causes  which  shall  awaken  our  loyalty. 
I  tried  to  indicate  to  you  at  the  last  time  the 
grounds  for  this  our  common  need  for  loyalty. 
In  order  to  do  so,  I  began  with  a  confessedly 
lower  view  of  loyalty.  I  have  asked  you,  for 
the  time,  in  this  opening  study,  to  abstract  al- 
together from  the  cause  to  which  any  man  is 
loyal,  to   leave   out   of   account   whether  that 

56 


INDIVIDUALISM 

cause  is  or  is  not  in  your  opinion  worthy,  ration 
to  begin  by  considering  what  good  the  loyaph 
man  gets  out  of  the  personal  attitude  of  loyalty, 
whatever  be  his  cause.     Only  by  thus  begin- 
ning can  we  prepare  the  way  for  a  higher  view 
of  loyalty. 

Loyalty,  I  have  said,  be  the  cause  worthy 
or  unworthy,  is  for  the  loyal  man  a  good, 
just  as,  even  if  his  beloved  be  unworthy,  love 
may  in  its  place  still  be  a  good  thing  for  a 
lover.  And  loyalty  is  for  the  loyal  man  not 
only  a  good,  but  for  him  chief  amongst  all  the 
moral  goods  of  his  life,  because  it  furnishes  to 
him  a  personal  solution  of  the  hardest  of 
human  practical  problems,  the  problem  :  "For 
what  do  I  live  ?  Why  am  I  here  ?  For  what 
am  I  good?     Why  am  I  needed?" 

The  natural  man,  more  or  less  vaguely  and 
unconsciously,  asks  such  questions  as  these. 
But  if  he  looks  merely  within  his  natural  self, 
he  cannot  answer  them.  Within  himself  he 
finds  vague  cravings  for  happiness,  a  chaos 
of  desires,  a  medley  of  conflicting  instincts. 
He  has  come  — 

57 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

pit        "  Into  this  universe,  the  why  not  knowing, 

Nor  whence,  like  water,  willy-nilly  flowing." 

He  must,  then,  in  any  case  consult  society  in 
order  to  define  the  purpose  of  his  life.  The 
social  order,  however,  taken  as  it  comes, 
gives  him  customs,  employment,  conventions, 
laws,  and  advice,  but  no  one  overmastering 
ideal.  It  controls  him,  but  often  by  the  very 
show  of  authority  it  also  inflames  his  self- 
will.  It  rebukes  and  amuses ;  it  threatens 
and  praises  him  by  turns;  but  it  leaves  him 
to  find  out  and  to  justify  the  sense  of  his  own 
life  as  he  can.  It  solves  for  him  no  ultimate 
problems  of  life,  so  long  as  his  loyalty  is 
unawakened. 

Only  a  cause,  then,  an  absorbing  and  fas- 
cinating social  cause,  which  by  his  own  will 
and  consent  comes  to  take  possession  of  his 
life,  as  the  spirits  that  a  magician  summons 
might  by  the  magician's  own  will  and  con- 
sent take  control  of  the  fortunes  of  the  one 
who  has  called  for  their  aid,  — only  a  cause, 
dignified  by  the  social  unity  that  it  gives  to 
many  human   lives,   but   rendered   also  vital 

58 


INDIVIDUALISM 

for  the  loyal  man  by  the  personal  affection 
which  it  awakens  in  his  heart,  only  such 
a  cause  can  unify  his  outer  and  inner  world. 
When  such  unity  comes,  it  takes  in  him  the 
form  of  an  active  loyalty.  Whatever  cause 
thus  appeals  to  a  man  meets  therefore  one 
of  his  deepest  personal  needs,  and  in  fact  the 
very  deepest  of  his  moral  needs ;  namely,  the 
need  of  a  life  task  that  is  at  once  voluntary 
and  to  his  mind  worthy. 

II 

So  far  the  former  discussion  led  us.  But 
already,  at  this  point,  an  objection  arises,  — 
or  rather,  there  arise  a  whole  host  of  objections, 
—  whereof  I  must  take  account  before  you 
will  be  ready  to  comprehend  the  philosophy 
of  loyalty  which  I  am  to  propose  in  later  lec- 
tures. These  objections,  familiar  in  the  present 
day,  come  from  the  partisans  of  certain  forms 
of  Individualism  which  in  our  modern  world 
are  so  prevalent.  I  shall  devote  this  lecture 
to  a  study  of  the  relations  of  the  spirit  of  loyalty 
to  the  spirit  of  individualism.     Individualism 

59 


h 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

is  as  Protean  as  loyalty.  Hence  my  task  in- 
volves meeting  various  very  different  objections. 
Somewhat  more  than  a  year  since,  I  was 
attempting  to  state  in  the  presence  of  a  com- 
pany of  young  people  my  arguments  for 
loyalty.  I  was  trying  to  tell  that  company, 
as  I  am  trying  to  tell  you,  how  much  we  all 
need  some  form  of  loyalty  as  a  centralizing 
motive  in  our  personal  lives.  I  was  also  de- 
ploring the  fact  that,  in  our  modern  American 
life,  there  are  so  many  social  motives  that  seem 
to  take  away  from  people  the  true  spirit  of 
lovaltv,  and  to  leave  them  distracted,  unsettled 
as  to  their  moral  standards,  uncertain  why  or 
for  what  they  live.  After  I  had  said  my  word, 
my  hearers  were  invited  to  discuss  the  ques- 
tion. Amongst  those  who  responded  was  a 
very  earnest  youth,  the  son  of  a  Russian  immi- 
grant. My  words  had  awakened  my  young 
friend's  righteous  indignation.  "Loyalty,"  so 
he  in  effect  said,  "has  been  in  the  past  one  of 
humanity's  most  disastrous  failings  and  weak- 
nesses. Tyrants  have  used  the  spirit  of  loyalty 
as  their  principal  tool.     I  am  glad,"  he  went 

60 


INDIVIDUALISM 

on,  "that  we  are  outgrowing  loyalty,  whatever 
its  forms  or  whatever  the  causes  that  it  serves. 
What  we  want  in  the  future  is  the  training  of 
individual  judgment.  We  want  enlighten- 
ment and  independence.  Let  us  have  done 
with  loyalty." 

I  need  hardly  remark  that  my  opponent's 
earnestness,  his  passion  for  the  universal  tri- 
umph of  individual  freedom,  his  plainness  of 
speech,  his  hatred  of  oppression,  were  them- 
selves symptoms  of  a  very  loyal  spirit.  For  he 
had  his  cause.  That  was  plain.  It  was  a 
social  cause,  — the  one  need  of  the  many  for 
release  from  the  oppressor.  He  spoke  like  a 
man  who  was  devoted  to  that  cause.  I 
honored  his  loyalty  to  humanity,  in  so  far  as 
he  understood  the  needs  of  his  fellows.  His 
spirit,  then,  as  he  spoke,  simply  illustrated 
my  own  thesis.  He  was  awake,  resolute, 
eager.  He  had  his  ideal.  And  his  loyalty  to 
the  cause  of  the  oppressed  had  given  to  him  this 
fine  self-possession.  He  was  a  living  instance 
of  my  view  of  the  value  of  loyalty  to  the  loyal 
man. 

61 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

So,  in  fact,  he  was  not  my  opponent.  But 
he  thought  that  he  was.  And  his  view  of 
loyalty,  his  conception  that  loyalty  is  by  its 
nature,  as  a  spirit  of  devotion  and  of  self- 
sacrifice  for  a  cause,  necessarily  a  spirit  of  sub- 
servience, of  slavish  submission, — this  view, 
I  say,  although  it  was  clearly  refuted  by  the 
very  existence  of  his  own  loyalty  to  the  cause 
of  the  relief  of  the  people  from  the  oppressor, 
was  still  a  misunderstanding  of  himself  and  of 
life,  — a  misunderstanding  such  as  is  nowa- 
days only  too  common.  Here,  then,  is  one 
form  which  current  objections  to  the  spirit  of 
loyalty  often  take. 

Another  and  a  decidedly  different  objection 
to  my  own  views  about  loyalty  was  expressed  to 
me,  also  within  the  past  year,  by  a  friend  high 
in  official  position  in  a  distant  community,  — 
a  teacher  who  has  charge  of  many  youthj  and 
who  is  profoundly  concerned  for  their  moral 
welfare.  "I  wish,"  he  said,  "that,  if  you 
address  the  youth^who  are  under  my  charge, 
you  would  tell  them  that  loyalty  to  their  vari- 
ous organizations,  to  their  clubs,  to  their  secret 

62 


INDIVIDUALISM 

societies,  to  their  own  student  body  generally, 
is  no  excuse  for  mischief-makers,  and  gives  to 
loyal  students  no  right  to  encourage  one  an- 
other to  do  mischief,  and  then  to  stand  to- 
gether to  shield  offenders  for  the  sake  of 
loyalty.  Loyalty  hereabouts,"  he  in  substance 
went  on,  speaking  of  his  own  community, 
"  is  a  cloak  to  cover  a  multitude  of  sins.  What  ^ 
these  youth  need  is  the  sense  that  each  individ- 
ual has  his  own  personal  duty,  and  should  de- 
velop his  own  conscience,  and  should  not  look 
to  loyally  to  excuse-him  from  individual  re- 
sponsibility.' ' 

The  objection  which  was  thus  in  substance 
contained  in  my  friend's  words,  was  of  course 
partly  an  objection  to  the  special  causes  to 
which  these  students  were  loyal ;  that  is,  it  was 
an  objection  to  their  clubs,  and  to  their  views 
about  the  special  rights  of  the  student  body. 
In  so  far,  of  course,  this  objection  does  not 
yet  concern  us;  for  I  am  not  now  estimating 
the  worth  of  men's  causes,  but  am  considering 
only  the  inner  value  of  the  loyal  spirit  to  the 
man  who  has  that  spirit,  whatever  be  the  cause 

63 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  LOYALTY 

to  which  this  man  is  loyal.  In  part,  however, 
this  objection  was  founded  upon  a  well-known 
form  of  ethical  individualism,  and  is  an  objec- 
tion that  does  here  concern  us.  For  his  own 
good,  so  my  critic  seemed  to  hold,  each  man 
needs  to  develop  his  own  individual  sense  of 
personal  duty  and  of  responsibility.  Loyalty, 
as  my  critic  further  held,  tends  to  take  the  life 
out  of  a  young  man's  conscience,  because  it 
makes  him  simply  look  outside  of  himself  to 
see  what  his  cause  requires  him  to  do.  In 
other  words,  loyalty  seems  to  be  opposed  to 
the  development  of  that  individual  auton- 
omy of  the  moral  will  which,  as  I  told  you 
in  the  last  lecture,  Kant  insists  upon,  and 
which  all  moralists  must  indeed  emphasize 
as  one  of  our  highest  goods.  If  I  look  to 
my  cause  to  tell  me  what  to  do,  am  I  not 
resigning  my  moral  birthright  ?  Must  I  not 
always  judge  my  own  duty?  Now,  does 
not  loyalty  tend  to  make  me  ask  my  club 
or  my  other  social  cause  simply  to  tell  me 
what  to  do? 

And  yet,  as  you  see,  even  the  objector  who 

64 


INDIVIDUALISM 

pointed  out  this  difficulty  about  loyalty  cannot 
have  been  as  much  my  opponent  as  he  seemed 
to  believe  that  he  was.  For  he  himself,  by 
virtue  of  his  own  autonomous  choice  of  his 
career,  is  a  very  loyal  teacher,  devoted  to  his 
office,  and  loyal  to  the  true  welfare  of  his  stu- 
dents as  he  sees  that  welfare.  I  am  sure  that 
his  spirit  must  be  the  very  loyalty  which  I 
have  been  describing  to  you.  He  is  an  inde- 
pendent sort  of  man,  who  has  chosen  his  cause 
and  is  now  profoundly  loyal.  Otherwise,  how 
could  he  love,  as  he  does,  the  hard  tasks  of  his 
office  and  live,  as  he  does,  in  his  devotion  to 
that  office,  accepting  its  demands  as  his  own  ? 
He  works  like  a  slave  at  his  own  task,  — and 
of  course  he  works  lovingly.  Yet  he  seemed 
to  condemn  the  loyalty  of  his  students  to  their 
clubs  as  essentially  slavish.  Is  there  not  some 
misunderstanding  here  ? 

But  yet  another,  and  once  more  a  very  dif- 
ferent form  of  individualism  I  find,  at  times, 
opposed  by  my  objectors  to  the  loyalty  whose 
importance  I  am  maintaining.  The  objection 
here  in  question  is  familiar.     It  may  be  stated 

f  65 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

thus:  The  modern  man — yes,  the  modern 
woman  also,  as  we  sometimes  are  told  — 
can  be  content  only  with  the  completest  pos- 
sible self-development  and  the  fullest  self- 
expression  which  the  conditions  of  our  social 
life  permit.  We  all  of  us  have  individual 
rights,  so  such  an  objector  vigorously  insists. 
Duties,  perhaps,  as  he  adds,  we  also  occa- 
sionally have,  under  rather  exceptional,  per- 
haps abnormal  and  annoying,  conditions. 
But  whether  or  no  the  duties  get  in  our  way 
and  hinder  our  growth^  the  rights  at  least 
are  ours.  Now,  there  is  no  good  equal  to  win- 
ning what  is  your  right ;  namely,  this  free 
self-expression,  this  untrammelled  play  of  the 
spirit.  You  have  opinions  ;  utter  them.  They 
are  opposed  to  current  moral  traditions ;  then 
so  much  the  better;  for  when  you  utter  them 
you  know,  because  of  their  unconventional 
sounds  that  they  must  be  your  own.  Even  so, 
your  social  ties*prove  irksome.  Break  them. 
Form  new  ones.  Is  not  the  free  spirit  eternally 
young  ?  From  this  point  of  view  loyalty  does 
indeed  appear  to  be  slavish.     Why  sacrifice  the 

66 


INDIVIDUALISM 

one  thing  that  you  have,  —  your  chance  to  be 
yourself,  and  nobody  else  ? 

I  need  not  further  pursue,  at  the  moment,  the 
statement  of  the  case  for  this  special  type  of 
modern  individualism.  In  this  form  indi- 
vidualism does  not  stand,  like  the  enthusiasm 
of  my  young  Russian,  for  sympathy  with  the 
oppressed,  but  rather  for  the  exuberance  of  the 
vitality  of  certain  people  who,  as  I  shall  here- 
after try  to  show,  have  not  yet  found  out  what 
to  do  with  themselves.  In  any  case,  individ- 
ualism of  this  sort,  as  I  have  said,  is  familiar 
enough.  You  know  it  well  in  recent  literature. 
Plays,  romances,  essays,  embody  its  teachings. 
You  know  this  form  of  individualism  also  in 
real  life.  You  read  of  its  doings  in  the  current 
newspapers.  As  you  go  about  your  own  daily 
business,  it  sometimes,  to  show  its  moral  dig- 
nity, jostles  you  more  than  even  our  modern 
congestion  of  population  makes  necessary; 
or  it  passes  you  by  all  too  swiftly  and 
perilously,  in  its  triumphant  and  intrepid  — 
self-assertion.  In  brief,  the  people  who  have 
more  rights  than  duties  have  gained  a  notable 

67 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

and  distinguished  ethical  position  in  our  mod- 
ern world.  The  selfish  we  had  always  with 
us.  But  the  divine  right  to  be  selfish  was  never 
more  ingeniously  defended,  in  the  name  of  the 
loftiest  spiritual  dignity,  than  it  is  sometimes 
defended  and  illustrated  to-day. 

But  even  now  I  have  not  done  with  stating 
the  case  of  my  objectors.  Still  another  form 
of  modern  individualism  exists,  and  this  form 
is  again  very  different  from  any  of  the  fore- 
going forms.  Yet  once  more  I  must  let  a 
friend  of  mine  state  the  case  for  this  sort  of 
individualism.  /This  is  no  longer  the  enthu- 
siastic revolt  against  the  oppressor  which  my 
young  Russian  expressed  rnor  is  it  the  interest 
in  moral  independence  of  judgment  which  the 
teacher  of  youth  emphasized  x  nor  is  it  the 
type  of  self-assertion  which  prefers  rights  to 
duties pit  is,  on  the  contrary,  the  individualism 
of  those  who  seek,  and  who  believe  that  they 
find,  an  interior  spiritual  light  which  guides 
them  and  which  relieves  them  of  the  need  of 
any  loyalty  to  externally  visible  causes.  Such 
people  might  themselves  sometimes  speak  of 

68 


INDIVIDUALISM 

their  fidelity  to  their  inner  vision  as  a  sort  of 
loyalty.  But  they  would  not  define  their 
loyalty  in  the  terms  which  I  have  used  in  de- 
fining the  loyal  spirit.  The  friend  of  whom  I 
have  spoken  stated  the  case  for  such  people  by 
saying:  "Loyalty,  such  as  you  define,  is  not 
a  man's  chief  good.  Spirituality,  contempla- 
tive self-possession,  rest  in  the  light  of  the  truth, 
interior  peace  — these  constitute,  if  one  can 
attain  to  them,  man's  chief  good.  Good  works 
for  other  men,  and  what  externally  appears  as 
loyal  conduct  — such  things  may  and  will 
result  from  the  attainment  of  inner  perfection, 
but  will  so  result  merely  because  the  good  soul 
overflows,  just  as,  to  adapt  the  famous  metaphor 
of  Plotinus,  just  as  the  sun  shines.  The  true 
good  is  to  be  at  one  with  yourself  within.  Then 
you  are  at  the  centre  of  your  world,  and  what- 
ever good  deeds  you  ought  to  do  will  result  from 
the  mere  fact  that  you  are  thus  self-possessed, 
and  are  therefore  also  in  possession  of  light  and 
peace.  It  is,  then,  spirituality  rather  than  loy- 
alty which  we  principally  need."  Thus,  then, 
my  friend's  objection  was  stated. 

69 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

I  have  thus  let  four  different  kinds  of  indi- 
vidualism state  their  case,  as  against  my  own 
thesis  that  loyalty  is  man's  chief  moral  good. 
Perhaps  the  foregoing  objections  are  the  prin- 
cipal ones  which  my  thesis  in  the  present  day 
has  to  meet;  although,  as  I  said,  a  host  of 
special  objections  can  be  made  merely  by 
varying  the  form  of  these.  The  objections, 
as  you  will  have  observed,  are  founded  upon 
very  various  and  mutually  conflicting  prin- 
ciples. Yet  each  one  of  them  seems  somewhat 
formidable,  especially  at  this  stage  of  my  argu- 
ment, where  I  am  maintaining,  not  that 
loyalty  is  good  because  or  in  so  far  as  its  cause 
is  objectively  and  socially  a  good  cause,  but 
that  loyalty  is  a  centrally  significant  good  for 
the  loyal  man  himself,  apart  from  the  cause 
to  which  he  is  loyal,  and  so  apart  from  the  use- 
fulness to  other  people  which  his  loyalty  may 
possess. 

Ill 

The  scholastic  philosopher,  Thomas  Aqui- 
nas, in  his  famous  theological  treatise7  the 
Summa,  always,  in  each  one  of  the  articles 

70 


INDIVIDUALISM 

into  which  his  work  is  divided,  gives  his 
opponents  the  word  before  he  states  his  own 
case.  And  after  thus  setting  forth  in  order 
the  supposed  reasons  for  the  very  views  which 
he  intends  to  combat,  and  immediately  before 
beginning  his  detailed  argument  for  the  theses 
that  he  proposes  to  defend,  he  confronts  his 
various  opponents  with  some  single  counter- 
consideration,  —  a  Scriptural  passage,  a  word 
from  the  Fathers,  or  whatever  brief  assertion 
will  serve  his  purpose,  — as  a  sort  of  indica- 
tion to  all  of  his  opponents  together  that  they 
somehow  must  be  in  the  wrong.  This  brief 
opening  of  his  confutation  is  always  formally 
introduced  by  the  set  phrase :  Sed  contra  est, 
"But  on  the  contrary  stands  the  fact  that," 
etc. 

And  so  now,  having  sketched  various  objec- 
tions, due  to  equally  various  forms  of  individ- 
ualism, I  may  venture  my  own  Sed  contra  est 
before  I  go  on  to  a  better  statement  of  my  case. 
Against  all  my  four  opponents  stands  the  fol- 
lowing fact :  — 

A  little  while  since  the  Japanese  won  much 

71 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

admiration  from  all  of  us  by  the  absolute 
loyalty  to  their  own  national  cause  which  they 
displayed  during  their  late  war.  Hereupon 
we  turned  for  information  to  our  various  au- 
thorities upon  things  Japanese,  and  came  to 
know  something  of  that  old  moral  code  Bushido 
which  Nitobe  in  his  little  book  has  called  the 
Soul  of  Japan.  Well,  whatever  our  other 
views  regarding  Japanese  life  and  policy,  I 
think  that  we  have  now  come  to  see  that  the 
ideal  of  Bushido,  the  ancient  Japanese  type 
of  loyalty,  despite  the  barbarous  life  of  feuds 
and  of  bloodshed  in  which  it  first  was  born, 
had  very  many  elements  of  wonderful  spiritual 
power  about  it.  Now,  Bushido  did  indeed  in- 
volve many  an ti -individualistic  features.  But 
it  never  meant  to  those  who  believed  in  it  any 
sort  of  mere  slavishness.  The  loyal  Japanese 
Samurai,  as  he  is  described  to  us  by  those  who 
know,  never  lacked  his  own  sort  of  self-asser- 
tion. He  never  accepted  what  he  took  to  be 
tyranny.  He  had  his  chiefs;  but  as  an  indi- 
vidual, he  was  proud  to  serve  them.  He  often 
used  his  own  highly  trained  judgment  regard- 

72 


INDIVIDUALISM 

ing  the  applications  of  the  complex  code  of 
honor  under  which  he  was  reared.  He  was 
fond  of  what  he  took  to  be  his  rights  as  a  man 
of  honor.  He  made  much^even  childlike,  dis- 
play of  his  dignity.  His  costume,  his  sword, 
his  bearing,  displayed  this  sense  of  his  im- 
portance. Yet  his  ideal  at  least,  and  in  large 
part  his  practice,  as  his  admirers  depict  him, 
involved  a  great  deal  of  elaborate  cultivation 
of  a  genuine  spiritual  serenity.  His  whole 
early  training  involved  a  repression  of  private 
emotions,  a  control  over  his  moods,  a  deliberate 
cheer  and  peace  of  mind,  all  of  which  he  con- 
ceived to  be  a  necessary  part  of  his  knightly 
equipment.  Chinese  sages,  as  well  as  Buddh- 
istic traditions,  influenced  his  views  of  the 
cultivation  of  this  interior  self-possession  and 
serenity  of  soul.  And  yet  he  was  also  a  man 
of  the  world,  a  warrior,  an  avenger  of  insults 
to  his  honor ;  and  above  all,  he  was  loyal.  His 
loyalty,  in  fact,  consisted  of  all  these  personal 
and  social  virtues  together. 

This  Japanese  loyalty  of  the  Samurai  was 
trained  by  the  ancient  customs  of  Bushido  to 

73 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

such  freedom  and  plasticity  of  conception 
and  expression  that,  when  the  modern  reform 
came,  the  feudal  loyalties  were  readily  trans- 
formed, almost  at  a  stroke,  into  that  active 
devotion  of  the  individual  to  the  whole  nation 
and  to  its  modern  needs  and  demands,  — that 
devotion,  I  say,  which  made  the  rapid  and 
wonderful  transformation  of  Japan  possible. 
The  ideal  of  Bushido,  meanwhile,  spread 
from  the  old  military  class  to  a  great  part  of 
the  nation  at  large.  It  is  plainly  not  the  only 
Japanese  ideal.  And  I  am  not  disposed  to 
exaggerate  what  I  hear  of  the  part  that  the 
old  Japanese  loyalty  actually  plays  in  deter- 
mining the  present  morality  of  the  plain  people 
of  that  country.  But  there  can  be  no  doubt 
that  Bushido  has  been  an  enviable  spiritual 
possession  of  vast  numbers  of  Japanese. 
It  is  indeed  universally  agreed  that  this  ideal 
of  loyalty  has  been  conceived  in  Japan  as 
requiring  a  certain  impersonalism,  a  certain 
disregard  of  the  central  importance  of  the 
ethical  individual.  And  I  myself  do  not  be- 
lieve, in  fact,  that  the  Japanese  have  rightly 

74 


INDIVIDUALISM 

conceived  the  true  worth  of  the  individual. 
And  yet,  after  all,  is  not  this  Japanese  ideal  of 
loyalty  a  sort  of  counter-instance  which  all 
the  various  opponents  of  loyalty,  whose  cases 
have  heretofore  been  stated,  ought  to  consider  ? 
For  Japanese  loyalty  has  not  been  a  mere 
tool  for  the  oppressors  to  use.  Herein  it  has 
indeed  strongly  differed  from  that  blind  and 
pathetic  loyalty  of  the  ignorant  Russian  peas- 
ant, which  my  young  friend  had  in  mind 
when  he  condemned  loyalty.  Japanese  loy- 
alty has  led,  on  the  contrary,  to  a  wonderful 
and  cordial  solidarity  of  national  spirit.  If 
it  has  discouraged  strident  self-assertion,  it 
has  not  suppressed  individual  judgment.  For 
the  modern  transformation  of  Japan  has 
surely  depended  upon  a  vast  development  of 
personal  ingenuity  and  plasticity,  not  only  in- 
tellectual but  moral.  This  loyalty  has  not 
made  machines  out  of  men.  It  has  given 
rise  to  a  wonderful  development  of  individual 
talent.  Japanese  loyalty,  furthermore,  if  in- 
deed strongly  opposed  to  the  individualism 
which  knows  its  rights  rather  than  its  duties, 

75 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

has  expressed  itself  in  an  heroic  vigor  of  life 
which  the  most  energetic  amongst  those  who 
love  to  assert  themselves  might  well  envy. 
And  meanwhile  this  loyalty,  in  some  at  least 
of  its  representatives,  has  included,  has  used, 
has  elaborately  trained  an  inner  serenity  of 
individual  self-control,  a  spiritual  peace  and 
inner  perfection  which  I  find  enviable, 
and  which  many  of  our  own  nervous  wan- 
derers upon  the  higher  plane  might  find 
indeed  restful  if  they  could  attain  to  it. 
There  is,  then,  not  so  much  opposition  be- 
tween the  good  which  the  loyal  may  win, 
and  the  various  personal  goods  which  our  par- 
tisans of  individualism  emphasized.  I  do  not 
believe  that  the  Japanese  ought  to  be  our 
models.  Our  civilization  has  its  own  moral 
problems,  and  must  meet  them  in  its  own  way. 
But  I  am  sure  that  our  various  partisans  of 
ethical  individualism,  when  they  conceive  that 
they  are  opponents  of  the  spirit  of  loyalty, 
ought  to  consider  those  aspects  of  Japanese 
loyalty  which  most  of  us  do  indeed  find  en- 
viable.    This  counter-instance  serves  to  show 

76 


INDIVIDUALISM 

that,  at  least  in  some  measure,  the  various 
personal  goods  which  the  different  ethical 
individualists  seek,  have  been  won,  and  so  can 
be  won,  by  means  of  the  spirit  of  loyalty. 


IV 

With  this  counter-instance  once  before  you, 
I  may  now  go  on  to  a  closer  analysis  of  the 
rational  claims  of  ethical  individualism. 

Whether  he  takes  account  of  the  physical 
or  of  the  natural  world,  every  man  inevitably 
finds  himself  as  apparently  occupying  the 
centre  of  his  own  universe.  The  starry 
heavens  form  to  his  eyes  a  sphere,  and  he  him- 
self, so  far  as  he  can  ever  see,  is  at  the  centre 
of  that  sphere.  Yes,  the  entire  and  infinite 
visible  world,  to  be  even  more  exact,  seems  to 
each  of  you  to  have  its  centre  about  where  the 
bridge  of  your  own  nose  chances  to  be.  What 
is  very  remote  from  us  we  all  of  us  find  it  diffi- 
cult to  regard  as  real  in  the  same  warm  and 
vital  sense  in  which  the  world  near  to  us  is 
real.     It  is  for  us  all  a  little  hard  to  see  how 

77 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

the  people  who  live  far  from  our  own  dwelling- 
place,  say,  the  Australians  or  the  Siberians, 
can  really  fail  to  observe  how  distant  they  are 
from  the  place  where,  after  all,  it  is  from  our 
point  of  view  most  natural  to  have  one's 
abiding-place.  And  the  people  of  alien  races 
must  surely  feel,  if  they  share  our  so  natural 
insight  regarding  them,  that  they  are  indeed 
a  strange  sort  of  folk. 

This  inevitable  illusion  of  perspective  is, 
of  course,  responsible  for  what  is  called  our 
natural  selfishness.  But  on  the  other  hand, 
this  illusion  is  no  mere  illusion.  It  suggests, 
even  while  it  distorts,  the  true  nature  of  things. 
The  real  world  has  a  genuine  relation  to  the 
various  personalities  that  live  in  it.  The 
truth  is  diversified  by  its  relation  to  these  per- 
sonalities. Values  do  indeed  alter  with  the 
point  of  view.  The  world  as  interpreted  by 
me  is  a  fact  different  from  the  world  as  inter- 
preted by  you ;  and  these  different  interpreta- 
tions have  all  of  them  their  basis  in  the  truth 
of  things.  So  far  as  moral  values  are  con- 
cerned, it  is  therefore  indeed  certain  that  no 

78 


INDIVIDUALISM 

ethical  doctrine  can  be  right  which  neglects 
individuals,  and  which  disregards,  I  will  not 
say  their  right,  but  their  duty  to  centralize 
their  lives,  and  so  their  moral  universe,  about 
their  own  purposes.  As  we  seem  to  be  at  the 
centre  of  the  starry  heavens,  so  each  of  us  is) 
indeed  at  the  centre  of  his  own  realm  of  duty. 
No  impersonal  moral  theory  can  be  successful. 
Individualism  in  ethics  has  therefore  its 
permanent  and,  as  I  believe,  its  absolute  jus- 
tification in  the  nature  of  things.  And  the 
first  principle  of  a  true  individualism  in  ethics 
is  indeed  that  moral  autonomy  of  any  rational 
person  which  I  mentioned  at  the  last  time, 
and  which  Kant  so  beautifully  defended. 
Only  your  own  will,  brought  to  a  true  knowl- 
edge of  itself,  can  ever  determine  for  you  what 
your  duty  is.  And  so  far,  then,  I  myself,  in 
defending  loyalty  as  a  good  thing  for  the  loyal, 
am  speaking  as  an  ethical  individualist.  My 
whole  case  depends  upon  this  fact.  And  so, 
in  following  my  argument,  you  need  not  fear 
that  I  want  to  set  some  impersonal  sort  of  life 
as  an  ideal  over  against  the  individualism  of 

79 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

the  opponents  of  loyalty  whose  various  cases  I 
have  just  been  stating.  I  contend  only  that 
their  opposition  to  loyalty,  their  view  that  one's 
individual  purposes  can  be  won  otherwise  than 
by  and  through  loyalty,  is  due  merely  to  their 
failure  to  comprehend  what  it  is  that  the  ethical 
individual  needs,  and  what  it  is  that  in  all, 
even  of  his  blindest  strivings,  he  is  still  seeking. 
What  I  hold  is,  that  he  inevitably  seeks  his 
own  form  of  loyalty,  his  own  cause,  and  his 
opportunity  to  serve  that  cause,  and  that  he 
can  actually  and  rationally  find  spiritual  rest 
and  peace  in  nothing  else.  Let  me  indicate  to 
you  my  reasons  for  this  view;  and  then,  as 
I  hope,  you  will  see  that  my  opponents  do  not 
at  heart  mean  to  oppose  me.  As  the  matter 
stands,  they  merely  oppose  themselves,  and 
this  through  a  mere  misapprehension. 

To  my  opponent,  wherever  he  is,  I  therefore 
say:  Be  an  individual;  seek  your  own  indi- 
vidual good;  seek  that  good  thoroughly,  un- 
swervingly, unsparingly,  with  all  your  heart 
and  soul.  But  I  persist  in  asking:  Where,  in 
heaven  above  and  in  earth  beneath,  have  you 

80       O 


INDIVIDUALISM 


to  look  for  this  your  highest  good?     Where 
can  you  find  it  ? 


The  first  answer  to  this  question  might  very 
naturally  take  the  form  of  saying:  "I  seek, 
as  my  highest  individual  good,  my  own  happi- 
ness." But,  as  I  pointed  out  to  you  in  my 
opening  discussion,  this  answer  only  gives  you 
your  problem  back  again,  unsolved.  Happi- 
ness involves  the  satisfaction  of  desires.  Your 
natural  desires  are  countless  and  conflicting. 
What  satisfies  one  desire  defeats  another. 
Until  your  desires  are  harmonized  by  means 
of  some  definite  plan  of  life,  happiness  is 
therefore  a  mere  accident.  Now  it  comes  and 
now  it  flies,  you  know  not  why.  And  the 
mere  plan* to  be  happy  if  you  can  is  by  itself 
no  plan.  You  therefore  cannot  adopt  the 
pursuit  of  happiness  as  your  profession.  The 
calling  that  you  adopt  will  in  any  case  be  some- 
thing that  the  social  order  in  which  you  live 
teaches  you ;  and  all  plans  will  in  your  mind  be 
practically  secondary  to  your  general  plan  to 

G  81 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

live  in  some  sort  of  tolerable  relation  to  your 
social  order.  For  you  are  indeed  a  social 
being. 

If,  next,  you  simply  say :  "Well,  then,  I  will 
live  as  my  social  order  requires  me  to  live,"  — 
again,  as  we  have  seen,  you  find  yourself  with- 
out any  determinate  way  of  expressing  your 
own  individuality.  For  if  the  social  order  is 
indeed  not  as  chaotic  in  its  activities  as  by 
nature  you  yourself  are,  it  is  quite  unable  of 
itself  to  do  more  than  to  make  of  you,  in  one 
way  or  another,  a  link  in  its  mechanism,  or 
a  member  of  one  of  its  numerous  herds,  in  anv 
case  a  mere  vehicle  for  carrying  its  various  in- 
fluences. Against  this  fate,  as  an  ethical  indi- 
vidual, you  justly  revolt.  If  this  chance  social 
existence  furnishes  to  you  your  only  plan  of 
life,  you  therefore  live  in  a  sad  but  altogether 
too  common  wavering  between  blind  submis- 
sion and  incoherent  rebellion.  As  Kant  says 
of  the  natural  human  being,  your  state  so  far 
remains  this,  that  you  can  neither  endure  your 
fellow-man  nor  do  without  him.  You  do  your 
daily  work  perhaps,  but  you  complain  of  your 

82 


INDIVIDUALISM 

employer.  You  earn  your  bread,  but  you 
are  bitter  because  of  hard  times,  and  because 
of  the  social  oppressions  that  beset  you. 
You  are  insufferably  dreary  when  alone, 
but  are  bored  when  in  company.  Your 
neighbors  determine  your  customs;  but  in 
return  for  the  art  of  life  thus  acquired,  you 
persistently  criticise  your  neighbors  for  their 
offences  against  custom.  Imitation  and  jeal- 
ousy, slavish  conventionality,  on  the  one  hand, 
secret  or  open  disorder,  on  the  other,  bicker- 
ings that  inflame,  and  gayeties  that  do  not 
cheer  — these,  along  with  many  joys  and  sor- 
rows that  come  by  accident,  constitute  upon 
this  level  the  chronicle  of  your  life.  It  is 
such  a  chronicle  that  the  daily  newspapers, 
in  the  most  of  their  less  violently  criminal  re- 
ports, constantly  rehearse  to  us,  so  far  as  they 
are  not  taken  up  with  reporting  the  really 
greater  social  activities  of  mankind.  Thus  the 
merely  social  animal  escapes  from  the  chaos 
of  his  natural  desires,  only  to  sink  to  the 
pettiness  of  a  hewer  of  wood  and  drawer  of 
water  for  his  lord,  the  social  order.     He  may 

83 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

become  fairly  happy  for  a  longer  or  shorter 
time ;  but  that  is  so  far  mere  chance.  He  may 
even  think  himself  fairly  contented,  but  that  is, 
upon  this  level,  mere  callousness. 

But  if,  indeed,  you  are  a  genuine  individual- 
ist, you  cannot  accept  this  fate.  If  you  are  an 
effective  individualist,  you  do  not  remain  a 
prey  to  that  fate.  You  demand  your  libera- 
tion. You  require  your  birthright  of  the  social 
order  which  has  brought  your  individuality  into 
being.  You  seek  the  salvation  of  yourself 
from  this  intolerable  bondage.  /  Now,  I  have 
already  counselled  you  to  seek  such  liberty 
in  the  form  of  loyalty ;  that  is,  of  a  willing  and 
whole-souled  devotion  to  a  fascinating  social 
cause.  But  perhaps  this  does  not  yet  seem  to 
you  the  solution.  And  therefore  you  may 
next  turn  to  a  very  familiar  form  of  individual- 
ism. You  may  say,  "Well,  then,  my  ideal  shall 
be  Power.     I  seek  to  be  master  of  my  fate." 

That  the  highest  good  for  the  individual  is 
to  be  defined  in  terms  of  Power,  —  this,  I  say, 
is  a  well-known  doctrine.  It  is  very  old.  It  is 
in  each  generation  renewed,  for  the  young  men 

84 


INDIVIDUAL 


ISM 


define  it  ever  afresh.  In  our  time  it  has  been 
emphasized  by  Nietzsche's  view  that  the  central 
principle  of  ethical  individuality  is  Der  Wille 
zur  Macht  — the  will  to  be  mighty. 

If  this  is  now  your  doctrine,  the  power  that 
you  seek  will,  of  course,  not  be  mere  brute 
force.  Those  have  ill  interpreted  Nietzsche, 
—  that  heavily  burdened  invalid,  doomed  to 
solitude  by  his  sensitiveness,  and  yet  longing 
amidst  his  sufferings  for  an  influence  over  his 
fellow-men  of  which  he  never  became  conscious 
before  the  end  came  to  him,  —  those  have  ill 
interpreted  him  who  have  found  in  his  passion- 
ate aphorisms  only  a  glorification  of  elemental 
selfishness.  No,  — power  for  Nietzsche,  as 
for  all  ethical  individualists  of  serious  signifi- 
cance, is  power  idealized  through  its  social 
efficacy,  and  conceived  in  terms  of  some  more 
or  less  vague  dream  of  a  completely  perfected 
and  ideal,  but  certainly  social,  individual  man. 
And  Nietzsche's*  particular  dream  of  power 
has  all  the  pathos  of  the  hopeless  invalid's 
longing  for  escape  from  his  disease.  The 
tragedy  of  his  personal  life  was  one  only  of  the 

85 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

countless  tragedies  to  which  the  seekers  after 
power  have  fallen  victims. 

Well,  if  it  is  power  that  you  seek,  your  ideal 
may  not  be  expressed  as  Nietzsche  expressed 
his,  but  in  any  case  you  will  be  seeking  some 
socially  idealized  type  of  power.  Warriors, 
statesmen,  artists,  will  be  before  your  mind 
as  examples  of  what  power,  if  attained,  would 
be.  In  your  sphere  you  will  be  seeking  to 
control  social  conditions,  and  to  centre  them 
about  your  individual  interests.  Our  present 
question  is :  Can  you  hope  to  attain  the  highest 
individual  good  by  such  a  quest  for  power  as 
this  ? 

When  we  remember  that  the  principal  theme 
of  heroic  tragedy  in  all  ages  has  been  the  fate 
of  the  seekers  after  individual  power,  and  that 
one  of  the  favorite  topics  of  comedy,  from 
the  beginning  of  comedy  until  to-day,  has  been 
the  absurdity  of  the  quest  of  these  very  lovers 
of  power,  our  question  begins  to  suggest  its 
own  answer.  Regarding  few  topics  have  the 
sages,  the  poets,  and  the  cynical  critics  of 
mankind  more  agreed  than  regarding  the  sig- 


INDIVIDUALISM 

nificance  of  the  search  for  power,  whenever 

(power  is  sought  otherwise  than  as  a  mere  means 
to  some  more  ideal  goal.  Let  us  then  merely 
recall  the  well-known  verdict  that  tragedy  and 
comedy,  and  the  wisdom  of  the  ages,  have 
passed  upon  the  lust  of  power. 

The  objections  to  defining  your  individual 
good  in  terms  merely  of  power  are  threefold. 
First,  the  attainment  of  power  is  a  matter  of 
fortune.  Set  your  heart  upon  power,  make  it 
your  central  good  in  life,  and  you  have  staked 
the  worth  of  your  moral  individuality  upon  a 
mere  venture.  In  the  end  old  age  and  death 
will  at  best  make  a  mockery  of  whatever  purely 
individual  powers  your  life  as  a  human  being 
can  possess  for  yourself  alone.  While  life 
lasts,  the  attainment  of  power  is  at  best  but  a 
little  less  uncertain  than  the  attainment  of  a 
purely  private  individual  happiness.  This  is 
the  first  objection  to  power  as  the  highest  indi- 
vidual good.  It  is  an  objection  as  sound  as  it 
is  old ;  and  in  this  objection  the  poets  and  the 
sages  are  at  one;  and  the  cynics  join  in  the 
verdict.  J£%C«  i    £bt~  « 

87 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

Secondly,  the  lust  for  power  is  insatiable. 
To  say,  I  seek  merely  power,  not  as  a  means  to 
an  end,  but  as  my  chief  good,  is  to  say  that,  for 
my  own  sake  alone,  I  condemn  myself  to  a 
laborious  quest  that  is  certain,  from  my  own 
point  of  view  and  however  fortune  favors  me, 
to  give  me  a  constantly  increasing  sense  that  I 
have  not  found  what  I  need.  Thus,  then,  I 
condemn  myself  to  an  endless  disappointment. 
This  objection  is  also  well  known ;  and  it  is 
easily  illustrated.  After  fortune  had  long 
seemed  to  be  actually  unable  to  thwart  Na- 
poleon, he  went  on  to  destroy  himself,  merely 
because  his  lust  for  power  grew  with  what  it 
fed  upon,  until  the  fatal  Russian  campaign 
became  inevitable. 

Thirdly,  in  the  often  quoted  words  of  Spi- 
noza, "The  power  of  man  is  infinitely  surpassed 
by  the  power  of  external  things;"  and  hence 
the  seeker  after  merely  individual  power  has 
undertaken  a  battle  with  the  essentially  irre- 
sistible forces  of  the  whole  universe.  There- 
fore, to  adapt  other  words  of  Soinoza,  when 
such  a  seeker  after  power  "ceases  to  suffer,  he 

88 


INDIVIDUALISM 

ceases  also  to  be."  The  larger  one's  powers, 
the  more  are  the  places  in  which  he  comes  in 
contact  with  the  world  that  he  would  con- 
quer, and  the  more  are  the  ways  in  which  he 
feels  its  force.  It  is  with  the  seeker  after  indi- 
vidual power  as  it  has  lately  been  with  some  of 
our  greater  corporations.  The  vaster  the  capi- 
tal of  these  corporations,  and  the  more  widely 
spread  the  interests  that  they  control,  the 
more  numerous  are  their  enemies,  the  harder 
the  legislative  enactments  that  they  have  to 
fear,  the  greater  their  fines  if  they  are  convicted 
of  misdoing.  Power  means  increasing  oppor- 
tunities for  conflict.  Hence  the  mere  seeker 
for  power  not  only,  by  the  accidents  of  fortune, 
may  meet  his  downfall,  but  also,  himself, 
actively  pursues  his  own  destruction. 

Whoever  pursues  power,  and  only  power, 
wars  therefore  with  unconquerable  fate.  But 
you  may  retort:  "Are  the  loyal  also  not  sub- 
ject to  fortune,  like  others?"  And,  in  reply, 
I  call  at  once  attention  to  the  fact  that  pre- 
cisely such  fate  is  what  the  loyal  also  unhesi- 
tatingly face;    but  they  meet  it  in  a  totally 

89 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

different  spirit.  They,  too,  are  indeed  subject 
to  fortune ;  their  loyalty,  also,  is  an  insatiable 
passion  to  serve  their  cause;  they  also  know 
what  it  is  to  meet  with  tasks  that  are  too  vast 
for  mortals  to  accomplish.  Only  their  very 
loyalty,  since  it  is  a  willing  surrender  of  the  self 
to  the  cause,  is  no  hopeless  warfare  with  this 
fate,  but  is  a  joyous  acceptance  in  advance  of  the 
inevitable  destiny  of  every  individual  human 
being.  In  such  matters,  as  you  well  know, 
"the  readiness  is  all."  Loyalty  discounts 
death,  for  it  is  from  the  start  a  readiness  to  die 
for  the  cause.  It  defies  fortune ;  for  it  says  : 
"Lo,  have  I  not  surrendered  my  all?  Did  I 
ever  assert  that  just  I  must  be  fortunate?" 
Since  it  views  life  as  service  of  the  cause,  it  is 
content  with  an  endless  quest.  Since  nothing 
is  too  vast  to  undertake  for  the  cause,  loyalty 
regards  the  greatness  of  its  tasks  as  mere 
opportunity.  But  the  lust  of  power,  on  the 
contrary,  has  staked  its  value  not  upon  the 
giving  up  of  self-will,  but  upon  the  attainment 
of  private  possessions,  upon  the  winning  of 
the  hopeless  fight  of  the  individual  with  his 

90 


INDIVIDUALISM 

private  fate.  Hence,  in  a  world  of  wandering 
and  of  private  disasters  and  unsettlement,  the 
loyal  indeed  are  always  at  home.  For  how- 
ever they  may  wander  or  lose,  they  view  their 
cause  as  fixed  and  as  worthy.  To  serve  the 
cause  is  an  honor;  and  this  honor  they  have 
in  their  own  possession.  But  in  this  same  world 
the  seekers  for  power  are  never  at  home.  If 
they  have  conquered  Western  Europe,  power 
lies  still  hidden  in  the  Far  East,  and  they  wan- 
der into  the  snows  of  a  Russian  winter  in  pur- 
suit of  that  ghost  of  real  life  which  always 
beckons  to  them  from  the  dark  world  beyond. 
Napoleon's  loyal  soldiers  won,  indeed,  their 
goal  when  they  died  in  his  service.  But  he 
lost.  They  were  more  fortunate  than  was 
their  leader.  They  had  their  will,  and  then 
slept.     He  lived  on  for  a  while,  and  failed. 

Such  considerations  may  suffice  to  show 
wherein  consists  the  blindness  of  those  who  in 
our  day  seem  to  themselves  to  have  more  rights 
than  duties.  This  homily  of  mine  about  the 
vanity  of  the  lust  for  power  is,  of  course,  a  very 
old    story.     You    may    think    these    remarks 

91 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

but  wearisome  moral  platitudes.  But  we  all 
have  to  learn  this  sort  of  lesson  sometime 
afresh,  and  for  ourselves.  And  if  the  story  of 
the  fate  of  the  lust  for  power  is  old,  it  is  none 
the  less  true.  And  it  is  a  story  that  we  in 
America  seem  to  need  to  have  told  to  us  anew 
to-day.  Any  financial  crisis  with  its  tragedies 
can  serve  by  way  of  illustration. 

But  perhaps  this  is  not  the  form  of  indi- 
vidualism which  is  asserted  by  the  ethical 
individualist  whom  I  am  now  addressing. 
Perhaps  you  say :  "It  is  not  mere  power  that  I 
want.  I  demand  moral  autonomy,  personal 
independence  of  judgment.  I  want  to  call 
my  soul  my  own.  The  highest  good  is  an 
active  self-possession."  Well,  in  this  case  I 
wholly  agree  with  your  demand,  precisely  in 
so  far  as  you  make  that  demand  positive.  I 
only  undertake  to  supplement  your  own  state- 
ment of  your  demand,  and  to  oppose  your 
denial  of  the  supreme  value  of  loyalty.  For 
what  end,  I  insist,  is  your  moral  independence 
good  ?  Do  you  find  anything  finally  impor- 
tant in  the  mere  fact  that  you  are  unlike  any- 

92 


INDIVIDUALISM 

body  else,  or  that  you  think  good  what  another 
man  condemns  ?  What  worth  could  you  find 
in  an  independence  that  should  merely  isolate 
you,  that  should  leave  you  but  a  queer  creature, 
whose  views  are  shared  by  nobody?  No,  — 
you  are  still  a  social  being.  What  you  really 
mean  is,  that  you  want  to  be  heard  and  re- 
spected as  regards  your  choice  of  your  own 
cause.  What  you  actually  intend  is,  that  no- 
body else  shall  determine,  apart  from  this  your 
own  choice,  the  special  loyalty  that  shall  be 
yours. 

Now,  I,  who  have  defined  loyalty  as  the  will- 
ing devotion  of  a  self  to  a  cause,  am  far  from 
demanding  from  you  any  unwilling  devotion 
to  any  cause.  You  are  autonomous,  of  course. 
You  can  even  cut  loose  from  all  loyalty  if  you 
will.  I  only  plead  that,  if  you  do  so,  if  you 
wholly  decline  to  devote  yourself  to  any  cause 
whatever,  your  assertion  of  moral  indepen- 
dence will  remain  but  an  empty  proclaiming  of 
a  moral  sovereignty  over  your  life,  without 
any  definite  life  over  which  to  be  sovereign. 
For  the  only  definite  life  that  you  can  live  will 

93 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

be  a  social  life.      This  social  life   may  indeed 

I  be  one  of  enmity  to  society.  But  in  that  case 
your  social  order  will  crush  you,  and  then  your 
moral  independence  will  die  without  any  of  the 
comfort  of  the  loyal  man's  last  glimpse  of 
the  banner  for  which  he  sheds  his  blood.  For 
the  loyal  man's  cause  survives  him.  Your 
independence  will  die  with  you,  and  while  it 
lives,  nobody  else  will  find  its  life  worth  insur- 
ing. Your  last  word  will  then  be  simply  the 
i  empty  phrase:  "Lo,  I  asserted  myself.!'  But 
in  the  supposed  case  of  your  enmity  to  society, 
you  will  never  know  what  it  was  that  you  thus 
asserted  when  you  asserted  yourself.  For  a 
man's  self  has  no  contents,  no  plans,  no  pur- 
poses, except  those  which  are,  in  one  way  or 
another,  defined  for  him  by  his  social  relations 
Or,  again,  your  life  may  indeed  be  one  of  social 
conformity,  of  merely  conventional  morality. 
But  such  a  life  you,  as  individualist,  have 
learned  to  despise,  — I  think  justly.  Your 
.  %K  \  only  recourse,  then,  is  to  assert  your  autonomy 
ftjp^  by  choosing  a  cause,  and  by  loyally  living,  and, 
when  need  be,  dying  for  that  cause.     Then  you 

94 


INDIVIDUALISM 

will  not  only  assert  yourself  by  your  choice  of 
a  cause,  but  express  yourself  articulately  by 
your  service.  The  only  way  to  be  practically 
autonomous  is  to  be  freely  loyal. 

Such  considerations  serve  to  indicate  my 
answer  to  those  individualists  who  insist  upon 
moral  independence.  My  young  Russian  and 
my  friend,  the  teacher,  were  individualists  of 
this  type.  My  answer  to  them  both,  as  you  see, 
is  that  the  only  coherent  moral  independence 
which  you  can  define  is  one  that  has  to  find  its 
expression  in  a  loyal  life.  There  is  endless 
room,  as  we  shall  hereafter  see,  for  a  rational 
autonomy  in  your  choice  of  your  cause. 

But  you  may  still  insist  that  one  other  form 
of  individualism  remains  open  to  you.  You 
may  say:  "I  seek  spirituality,  serenity,  an 
inward  peace,  which  the  world  cannot  give  or 
take  away.  Therefore  my  highest  good  lies 
not  in  loyalty,  but  in  this  interior  perfection;" 
But  once  more  I  answer  you  with  the  whole 
verdict  of  human  experience  regarding  the 
true  nature  of  spiritual  self-possession.  You 
seek  serenity.     Yes,  but  you  do  not  want  your 

95 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

serenity  to  mean  mere  apathy.  You  seek 
peace,  but  you  do  not  want  dreamless  sleep, 
nor  yet  the  repose  of  a  swoon.  The  stones 
seem  to  remain  serene  when  you  by  chance 
stumble  over  them;  some  tropical  islanders 
slumber  peacefully  in  their  huts  when  there  is 
no  work  pressing.  But  the  types  of  serenity 
that  are  for  you  in  question  are  not  of  such 
sort.  You  are  an  ethical  individualist.  Your 
repose  must  therefore  be  the  only*  repose  pos- 
sible to  a  being  with  a  conscious  and  a  vital 
will  of  his  own.  It  must  be  the  repose  of  ac- 
tivity; the  assurance  of  one  who  lives  ener- 
getically, even  because  he  lives  in  the  spirit. 
But  in  what  spirit  shall  you  live?  Are  you 
not  a  man  ?  Can  you  live  with  an  active  will 
of  your  own  without  living  amongst  your 
brethren?  Seek,  then,  serenity,  but  let  it  be 
the  serenity  of  the  devotedly  and  socially  active 
being.  Otherwise  your  spiritual  peace  is  a 
mere  feeling  of  repose,  and,  as  such,  contents 
at  its  best  but  one  side  of  your  nature,  namely, 
the  merely  sensuous  side.  The  massive  sen- 
sation that  all  things  are  somehow  well  is  not 

96 


INDIVIDUALISM 

the  highest  good  of  an  active  being.  Even  one 
of  the  most  typical  of  mystics,  Meister  Eckhart, 
once  stated  his  case,  regarding  a  true  spiritual 
life,  thus :  "That  a  man  should  have  a  life  of 
rest  and  peace  in  God  is  good ;  that  he  should 
bear  a  painful  life  with  patience  is  better; 
but  that  he  should  find  his  rest  even  in  his  pain- 
ful life,  that  is  best  of  all."  Now,  this  last 
state,  the  finding  of  one's  rest  and  spiritual 
fulfilment  even  in  one's  very  life  of  toil  itself,  — 
this  state  is  precisely  the  state  of  the  loyal, 
in  so  far  as  their  loyalty  gets  full  control  of 
their  emotional  nature.  I  grant  you  that  not 
all  the  loyal  are  possessed  of  this  serenity; 
but  that  is  because  of  their  defects  of  nature 
or  of  training.  Their  loyalty  would  be  more 
effective,  indeed,  if  it  were  colored  throughout 
by  the  serenity  that  you  pursue.  But  your  own 
peace  of  spirit  will  be  meaningless  unless  it  is 
the  peace  of  one  who  is  willingly  devoted  to  his 
cause.  "The  loving,"  says  Bayard  Taylor,  in 
his  lyric  of  Sebastopol,  "the  loving  are  the  dar-  [ 
ing."  And  I  say:  The  truly  serene  of  spirit 
are  to  be  found  at  their  best  amongst  the  loyal. 
h  97 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

In  view  of  such  considerations,  when  I  listen 
to  our  modern  ethical  individualists, — to  our 
poets,  dramatists,  essayists  who  glorify  per- 
sonal initiative  — to  our  Walt  Whitman,  to 
Ibsen,  and,  above  all,  when  I  listen  to  Nietzsche, 
— I  confess  that  these  men  move  me  for  a  time, 
but  that  erelong  I  begin  to  listen  with  impa- 
tience. Of  course,  I  then  say,  be  indeed  auton- 
omous. Be  an  individual.  But  for  Heaven's 
i  sake,  set  about  the  task.  Do  not  forever  whet 
the  sword  of  your  resolve.  Begin  the  battle 
of  real  individuality.  Why  these  endless  pre- 
liminary gesticulations?  "Leave  off  thy — 
grimaces,"  and  begin.  There  is  only  one  way 
to  be  an  ethical  individual.  That  is  to  choose 
your  cause,  and  then  to  serve  it,  as  the  Samurai 
his  feudal  chief,  as  the  ideal  knight  of  romantic 
story  his  lady,  —  in  the  spirit  of  all  the  loyal. 

'       ,       "      "■"  J 

V 

98 


Ill 

LOYALTY  TO  LOYALTY 


LECTURE  III 

LOYALTY    TO    LOYALTY 

THE  two  foregoing  lectures  have  been  de- 
voted to  defending  the  thesis  that  loyalty 
is,  for  the  loyal  individual  himself,  a  supreme 
good,  whatever  be,  for  the  world  in  general, 
the  worth  of  his  cause.  We  are  next  to  con- 
sider what  are  the  causes  which  are  worthy  of 
loyalty. 


But  before  I  go  on  to  this  new  stage  of  our 
discussion,  I  want,  by  way  of  summary  of  all 
that  has  preceded,  to  get  before  your  minds  as 
clear  an  image  as  I  can  of  some  representative 
instance  of  loyalty.  The  personal  dignity  and 
worth  of  a  loyal  character  can  best  be  appre- 
ciated by  means  of  illustrations.  And  I  con- 
fess that  those  illustrations  of  loyalty  which  my 
earlier  lectures  used  must  have  aroused  some 
associations  which  I  do  not  want,  as  I  go  on  to 

101 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

my  further  argument,  to  leave  too  prominent 
in  your  minds.  I  chose  those  instances  be- 
cause they  were  familiar.  Perhaps  they  are 
too  familiar.  I  have  mentioned  the  patriot 
aflame  with  the  war-spirit,  the  knight  of  ro- 
mance, and  the  Japanese  Samurai.  But  these 
examples  may  have  too  much  emphasized  the 
common  but  false  impression  that  loyalty 
necessarily  has  to  do  with  the  martial  virtues 
and  with  the  martial  vices.  I  have  also  used 
the  instance  of  the  loyal  captain  standing  by 
his  sinking  ship.  But  this  case  suggests  that 
the  loyal  have  their  duties  assigned  to  them  by 
some  established  and  customary  routine  of  the 
service  to  which  they  belong.  And  that,  again, 
is  an  association  that  I  do  not  want  you  to 
make  too  prominent.  Loyalty  is  perfectly 
consistent  with  originality.  The  loyal  man 
may  often  have  to  show  his  loyalty  by  some  act 
which  no  mere  routine  predetermines.  He  may 
have  to  be  as  inventive  of  his  duties  as  he  is 
faithful  to  them. 

Now,  I  myself  have  for  years  used  in  my  own 
classes,  as  an  illustration  of  the  personal  worth 

102 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

and  beauty  of  loyalty,  an  incident  of  English 
history,  which  has  often  been  cited  as  a 
precedent  in  discussions  of  the  constitutional 
privileges  of  the  House  of  Commons,  but  which, 
as  I  think,  has  not  been  sufficiently  noticed  by 
moralists.  Let  me  set  that  incident  now  be- 
fore your  imagination.  Thus,  I  say,  do  the 
loyal  bear  themselves :  In  January,  1642,  just 
before  the  outbreak  of  hostilities  between 
King  Charles  I  and  the  Commons,  the  King 
resolved  to  arrest  certain  leaders  of  the  oppo- 
sition party  in  Parliament.  He  accordingly 
sent  his  herald  to  the  House  to  demand  the 
surrender  of  these  members  into  his  custody. 
The  Speaker  of  the  House  in  reply  solemnly 
appealed  to  the  ancient  privileges  of  the  House, 
which  gave  to  that  body  jurisdiction  over  its 
own  members,  and  which  forbade  their  arrest 
without  its  consent.  The  conflict  between  the 
privileges  of  the  House  and  the  royal  preroga- 
tive was  herewith  definitely  initiated.  The 
King  resolved  by  a  show  of  force  to  assert  at 
once  his  authority ;  and,  on  the  day  following 
that  upon  which  the  demand  sent  through  his 

103 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

herald  had  been  refused,  he  went  in  person, 
accompanied  by  soldiers,  to  the  House.  Then, 
having  placed  his  guards  at  the  doors,  he  en- 
tered, went  up  to  the  Speaker,  and,  naming  the 
members  whom  he  desired  to  arrest,  demanded, 
"Mr.  Speaker,  do  you  espy  these  persons  in 
the  House?" 

You  will  observe  that  the  moment  was  an 
unique  one  in  English  history.  Custom,  prece- 
dent, convention,  obviously  were  inadequate 
to  define  the  Speaker's  duty  in  this  most  criti- 
cal instance.  How,  then,  could  he  most  ad- 
mirably express  himself?  How  best  preserve 
his  genuine  personal  dignity  ?  What  response 
would  secure  to  the  Speaker  his  own  highest 
good  ?  Think  of  the  matter  merely  as  one  of 
the  Speaker's  individual  worth  and  reputation. 
By  what  act  could  he  do  himself  most  honor  ? 

In  fact,  as  the  well-known  report,  entered 
in  the  Journal  of  the  House,  states,  the  Speaker 
at  once  fell  on  his  knee  before  the  King  and 
said:  "Your  Majesty,  I  am  the  Speaker  of 
this  House,  and,  being  such,  I  have  neither 
eyes  to  see  nor  tongue  to  speak  save  as  this 

104 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

House  shall  command;  and  I  humbly  beg 
your  Majesty's  pardon  if  this  is  the  only  an- 
swer that  I  can  give  to  your  Majesty." 

Now,  I  ask  you  not,  at  this  point,  to  consider 
the  Speaker's  reply  to  the  King  as  a  deed 
having  historical  importance,  or  in  fact  as 
having  value  for  anybody  but  himself.  I  want 
you  to  view  the  act  merely  as  an  instance  of 
a  supremely  worthy  personal  attitude.  The 
beautiful  union  of  formal  humility  (when  the 
Speaker  fell  on  his  knee  before  the  King) 
with  unconquerable  self-assertion  (when  the 
reply  rang  with  so  clear  a  note  of  lawful  de- 
fiance); the  willing  and  complete  identifica- 
tion of  his  whole  self  with  his  cause  (when  the 
Speaker  declared  that  he  had  no  eye  or  tongue 

#pt  as  his  office  gave  them  to  him),  — these 
characteristics  typical  of  a  loyal  attitude. 
The  Speaker's  words  were  at  once  ingenious 
and  obvious.  They  were  in  line  with  the  an- 
cient custom  of  the  realm.  They  were  also 
creative  of  a  new  precedent.  He  had  to  be 
inventive  to  utter  them ;  but  once  uttered,  they 
seem  almost  commonplace  in  their  plain  truth. 

105 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

The  King  might  be  offended  at  the  refusal; 
but  he  could  not  fail  to  note  that,  for  the  mo- 
ment, he  had  met  with  a  personal  dignity 
greater  than  kingship,  —  the  dignity  that  any 
loyal  man,  great  or  humble,  possesses  whenever 
he  speaks  and  acts  in  the  service  of  his  cause. 
Well  — here  is  an  image  of  loyalty.  Thus, 
I  say,  whatever  their  cause,  the  loyal  express 
themselves.  When  any  one  asks  me  what  the 
worthiest  personal  bearing,  the  most  dignified 
and  internally  complete  expression  of  an  indi- 
vidual is,  I  can  therefore  only  reply:  Such  a 
bearing,  such  an  expression  of  yourself  as  the 
Speaker  adopted.  Have,  then,  your  cause, 
chosen  by  you  just  as  the  Speaker  had  chosen 
to  accept  his  office  from  the  House.  Let  this 
cause  so  possess  you  that,  even  in  the  most 
thrilling  crisis  of  your  practical  service  of  that 
cause,  you  can  say  with  the  Speaker:  "I  am 
the  servant  of  this  cause,  its  reasonable,  its 
willing,  its  devoted  instrument,  and,  being 
such,  I  have  neither  eyes  to  see  nor  tongue  to 
speak  save  as  this  cause  shall  command." 
Let  this  be  your  bearing,  and  this  your  deed. 

1^6 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

Then,  indeed,  you  know  what  you  live  for. 
And  you  have  won  the  attitude  which  consti- 
tutes genuine  personal  dignity.  What  an  indi- 
vidual in  his  practical  bearing  can  be,  you 
now  are.  And  herein,  as  I  have  said,  lies  for 
you  a  supreme  personal  good. 

II 

With  this  image  of  the  loyal  self  before  us, 
let  us  now  return  to  the  main  thread  of  our 
discourse.  We  have  deliberately  declined,  so 
far,  to  consider  what  the  causes  are  to  which 
men  ought  to  be  loyal.  To  turn  to  this  task  is 
the  next  step  in  our  philosophy  of  loyalty. 

Your  first  impression  may  well  be  that  the 
task  in  question  is  endlessly  complex.  In  our 
opening  lecture  we  defined  indeed  some  gen- 
eral characteristics  which  a  cause  must  possess 
in  order  to  be  a  fitting  object  of  loyalty.  A 
cause,  we  said,  is  a  possible  object  of  loyalty 
only  in  case  it  is  such  as  to  join  many  persons 
into  the  unity  of  a  single  life.  Such  a  cause,  we 
said,  must  therefore  be  at  once  personal,  and, 
for  one  who  defines  personality  from  a  purely 

107 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

human  point  of  view,  superpersonal.  Our  ini- 
tial illustrations  of  possible  causes  were,  first, 
a  friendship  which  unites  several  friends  into 
some  unity  of  friendly  life ;  secondly,  a  family, 
whose  unity  binds  its  members'  lives  together ; 
and,  thirdly,  the  state,  in  so  far  as  it  is  no  mere 
collection  of  separate  citizens,  but  such  an  unity 
as  that  to  which  the  devoted  patriot  is  loyal. 
As  we  saw,  such  illustrations  could  be  vastly 
extended.  All  stable  social  relations  may  give 
rise  to  causes  that  may  call  forth  loyalty. 

Now,  it  is  obvious  that  nobody  can  be  equally 
and  directly  loyal  to  all  of  the  countless  actual 
social  causes  that  exist.  It  is  obvious  also 
that  many  causes  which  conform  to  our  general 
definition  of  a  possible  cause  may  appear  to  any 
given  person  to  be  hateful  and  evil  causes,  to 
which  he  is  justly  opposed.  A  robber  band, 
a  family  engaged  in  a  murderous  feud,  a  pirate 
crew,  a  savage  tribe,  a  Highland  robber  clan 
of  the  old  days  — these  might  constitute 
causes  to  which  somebody  has  been,  or  is,  pro- 
foundly loyal.  Men  have  loved  such  causes 
devotedly,   have  served  them  for  a  lifetime. 

108 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

Yet  most  of  us  would  easily  agree  in  thinking 
such  causes  unworthy  of  anybody's  loyalty. 
Moreover,  different  loyalties  may  obviously 
stand  in  mutual  conflict,  whenever  their  causes 
are  opposed.  Family  feuds  are  embittered  by 
the  very  strength  of  the  loyalty  of  both  sides. 
My  country,  if  I  am  the  patriot  inflamed  by  the 
war-spirit,  seems  an  absolutely  worthy  cause; 
but  my  enemy's  country  usually  seems  hateful 
to  me  just  because  of  my  own  loyalty;  and 
therefore  even  my  individual  enemy  may  be 
hated  because  of  the  supposed  baseness  of  his 
cause.  War-songs  call  the  individual  enemy  ^ 
evil  names  just  because  he  possesses  the  very 
personal  qualities  that,  in  our  own  loyal  fellow- 
countrymen,  we  most  admire.  "No  refuge 
could  save  the  hireling  and  slave."  Our 
enemy,  as  you  see,  is  a  slave,  because  he  serves 
his  cause  so  obediently.  Yet  just  such  service 
we  call,  in  our  own  country's  heroes,  the  wor- 
thiest devotion. 

Meanwhile,    in    the    foregoing    account    of     ^» 
loyalty  as  a  spiritual  good  to  the  loyal  man,  we 
have  insisted  that  true  loyalty,  being  a  willing 

109 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

devotion  of  the  self  to  its  cause,  involves  some 
element  of  autonomous  choice.  Tradition 
has  usually  held  that  a  man  ought  to  be  loyal 
to  just  that  cause  which  his  social  station  deter- 
mines for  him.  Common  sense  generally  says, 
that  if  you  were  born  in  your  country,  and  still 
live  there,  you  ought  to  be  loyal  to  that  country, 
and  to  that  country  only,  hating  the  enemies 
across  the  border  whenever  a  declaration  of 
war  requires  you  to  hate  them.  But  we  have 
declared  that  true  loyalty  includes  some  ele- 
ment of  free  choice.  Hence  our  own  account 
seems  still  further  to  have  complicated  the 
theory  of  loyalty.  For  in  answering  in  our 
last  lecture  the  ethical  individualists  who  ob- 
jected to  loyalty,  we  have  ourselves  deliberately 
given  to  loyalty  an  individualistic  coloring. 
And  if  our  view  be  right,  and  if  tradition  be 
wrong,  so  much  the  more  difficult  appears  to 
be  the  task  of  defining  wherein  consists  that 
which  makes  a  cause  worthy  of  loyalty  for  a 
given  man,  since  tradition  alone  is  for  us  an 
insufficient  guide. 

To  sum  up,  then,  our  apparent  difficulties, 
no 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

they  are  these :  Loyalty  is  a  good  for  the  loyal 
man ;  but  it  may  be  mischievous  for  those 
whom  his  cause  assails.  Conflicting  loyalties 
may  mean  general  social  disturbances;  and 
the  fact  that  loyalty  is  good  for  the  loyal  does 
not  of  itself  decide  whose  cause  is  right  when 
various  causes  stand  opposed  to  one  another. 
And  if,  in  accordance  with  our  own  argument 
in  the  foregoing  lecture,  we  declare  that  the 
best  form  of  loyalty,  for  the  loyal  individual, 
is  the  one  that  he  freely  chooses  for  himself, 
so  much  the  greater  seems  to  be  the  complica- 
tion of  the  moral  world,  and  so  much  the  more 
numerous  become  the  chances  that  the  loyal- 
ties of  various  people  will  conflict  with  one 
another. 

Ill 

In  order  to  overcome  such  difficulties,  now 
that  they  have  arisen  in  our  way,  and  in  order 
to  discover  a  principle  whereby  one  may  be 
guided  in  choosing  a  right  object  for  his  loyalty, 
we  must  steadfastly  bear  in  mind  that,  when 
we  declared  loyalty  to  be  a  supreme  good  for 

in 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

the  loyal  man  himself,  we  were  not  speaking 
of  a  good  that  can  come  to  a  few  men  only  — ■ 
to  heroes  or  to  saints  of  an  especially  exalted 
mental  type.  As  we  expressly  said,  the 
mightiest  and  the  humblest  members  of  any 
social  order  can  be  morally  equal  in  the  ex- 
emplification of  loyalty.  Whenever  I  myself 
begin  to  look  about  my  own  community  to 
single  out  those  people  whom  I  know  to  be, 
in  the  sense  of  our  definition,  especially  loyal 
to  their  various  causes,  I  always  find,  amongst 
the  most  exemplary  cases  of  loyalty,  a  few  in- 
deed of  the  most  prominent  members  of  the 
community,  whom  your  minds  and  mine  must 
at  once  single  out  because  their  public  services 
and  their  willing  sacrifices  have  made  their 
loyalty  to  their  chosen  causes  a  matter  of  com- 
mon report  and  of  easy  observation.  But 
my  own  mind  also  chooses  some  of  the  plain- 
est and  obscurest  of  the  people  whom  I  chance 
to  know,  the  most  straightforward  and  simple- 
minded  of  folk,  whose  loyalty  is  even  all  the 
more  sure  to  me  because  I  can  certainly 
affirm  that  they,  at  least,  cannot  be  making 

112 


LOYALTY   TO    LOYALTY 

any  mere  display  of  loyalty  in  order  that  they 
should  be  seen  of  men.  Nobody  knows  of 
their  loyalty  except  those  who  are  in  more  or 
less  direct  touch  with  them ;  and  these  usually 
appreciate  this  loyalty  too  little.  You  all  of 
you  similarly  know  plain  and  wholly  obscure 
men  and  women,  of  whom  the  world  has  never 
heard,  and  is  not  worthy,  but  who  have  pos- 
sessed and  who  have  proved  in  the  presence  of 
you  who  have  chanced  to  observe  them,  a  loyalty 
to  their  chosen  causes  which  was  not  indeed 
expressed  in  martial  deeds,  but  which  was  quite 
as  genuine  a  loyalty  as  that  of  a  Samurai,  or 
as  that  of  Arnold  von  Winkelried  when  he 
rushed  upon  the  Austrian  spears.  As  for  the 
ordinary  expressions  of  loyalty,  not  at  critical 
moments  and  in  the  heroic  instants  that  come 
to  the  plainest  lives,  but  in  daily  business,  we 
are  all  aware  how  the  letter  carrier  and  the 
housemaid  may  live,  and  often  do  live,  when 
they  choose,  as  complete  a  daily  life  of  steadfast 
loyalty  as  could  any  knight  or  king.  Some  of 
us  certainly  know  precisely  such  truly  great 
personal  embodiments  of  loyalty  in  those  who 

I  113 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

are,  in  the  world's  ill-judging  eyes,  the  little 
ones  of  the  community. 

Now  these  facts,  I  insist,  show  that  loyalty 
is  in  any  case  no  aristocratic  gift  of  the  few. 
It  is,  indeed,  too  rare  a  possession  to-day  in 
our  own  American  social  order;  but  that 
defect  is  due  to  the  state  of  our  present  moral 
education.  We  as  a  nation,  I  fear,  have  been 
forgetting  loyalty.  We  have  been  neglecting  to 
cultivate  it  in  our  social  order.  We  have  been 
making  light  of  it.  We  have  not  been  train- 
ing ourselves  for  it.  Hence  we,  indeed,  often 
sadly  miss  it  in  our  social  environment.  But 
all  sound  human  beings  are  made  for  it  and 
can  learn  to  possess  it  and  to  profit  by  it. 
And  it  is  an  essentially  accessible  and  prac- 
tical virtue  for  everybody. 

This  being  true,  let  us  next  note  that  all  the 
complications  which  we  just  reported  are  ob- 
viously due,  in  the  main,  to  the  fact  that,  as 
loyal  men  at  present  are,  their  various  causes, 
and  so  their  various  loyalties,  are  viewed  by 
them  as  standing  in  mutual,  sometimes  in 
deadly   conflict.     In   general,    as    is    plain    if 

114 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

somebody's  loyalty  to  a  given  cause,  as  for 
instance  to  a  family,  or  to  a  state,  so  expresses 
itself  as  to  involve  a  feud  with  a  neighbor's 
family,  or  a  warlike  assault  upon  a  foreign 
state,  the  result  is  obviously  an  evil;  and  at 
least  part  of  the  reason  why  it  is  an  evil  is 
that,  by  reason  of  the  feud  or  the  war,  a  cer- 
tain good,  namely,  the  enemy's  loyalty,  to- 
gether with  the  enemy's  opportunity  to  be 
loyal,  is  assailed,  is  thwarted,  is  endangered, 
is,  perhaps,  altogether  destroyed.  If  the  loy- 
alty of  A  is  a  good  for  him,  and  if  the  loyalty 
of  B  is  a  good  for  him,  then  a  feud  between 
A  and  B,  founded  upon  a  mutual  conflict 
between  the  causes  that  they  serve,  obviously 
involves  this  evil,  namely,  that  each  of  the 
combatants  assails,  and  perhaps  may  alto- 
gether destroy,  precisely  what  we  have  seen 
to  be  the  best  spiritual  possession  of  the 
other,  namely,  his  chance  to  have  a  cause 
and  to  be  loyal  to  a  cause.  The  militant 
loyalty,  indeed,  also  assails,  in  such  a  case, 
the  enemy's  physical  comfort  and  well-being, 
his  property,  his  life;    and  herein,  of  course, 

115 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

militant  loy  i/y  does  evil  to  the  enemy.  But 
if  each  man's  having  and  serving  a  cause  is 
his  best  good,  the  worst  of  the  evils  of  a  feud 
is  the  resulting  attack,  not  upon  the  enemy's 
comfort  or  his  health  or  his  property  or  his 
life,  but  upon  the  most  precious  of  his  posses- 
sions, his  loyalty  itself. 

If  loyalty  is  a  supreme  good,  the  mutually 
destructive  conflict  of  loyalties  is  in  general  a 
supreme  evil.  If  loyalty  is  a  good  for  all 
sorts  and  conditions  of  men,  the  war  of  man 
against  man  has  been  especially  mischievous, 
not  so  much  because  it  has  hurt,  maimed,  im- 
poverished, or  slain  men,  as  because  it  has 
so  often  robbed  the  defeated  of  their  causes, 
of  their  opportunities  to  be  loyal,  and  some- 
times of  their  very  spirit  of  loyalty. 

If,  then,  we  look  over  the  field  of  human 
life  to  see  where  good  and  evil  have  most 
clustered,  we  see  that  the  best  in  human  life 
is  its  loyalty ;  while  the  worst  is  whatever  has 
tended  to  make  loyalty  impossible,  or  to 
destroy  it  when  present,  or  to  rob  it  of  its  own 
while  it  still  survives.     And  of  all  things  that 

116 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYiS    ,TY 

thus  have  warred  with  loyalty',  he  bitterest 
woe  of  humanity  has  been  thatcso  often  it  is 
the  loyal  themselves  who  have  thus  blindly 
and  eagerly  gone  about  to  wound  and  to  slay 
the  loyalty  of  their  brethren.  The  spirit  of 
loyalty  has  been  misused  to  make  men  commit 
sin  against  this  very  spirit,  holy  as  it  is.  For 
such  a  sin  is  precisely  what  any  wanton  con- 
flict of  loyalties  means.  Where  such  a  con- 
flict  occurs,  the  best,  namely,  loyalty,  is 
used  as  an  instrument  in  order  to  compassthe 
worst,  namely,  the  destruction  of  loyalty. 

It  is  true,  then,  that  some  causes  are  good,  o 
while  some  are  evil.  But  the  test  of  good  and 
evil  in  the  causes  to  which  men  are  loyal  is 
now  definable  in  terms  which  we  can  greatly 
simplify  in  view  of  the  foregoing  considera- 
tions. 

If,  namely,  I  find  a  cause,  and  this  cause 
fascinates  me,  and  I  give  myself  over  to  itsj 
service,  I  in  so  far  attain  what,  for  me,  if  nr 
loyalty  is  complete,  is  a  supreme  good.     Bui 
my  cause,  by  our  own  definition,  is  a  social 
cause,  which  binds  many  into  the  unity  of 

117 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

one  service.  My  cause,  therefore,  gives  me, 
of  necessity,  fellow-servants,  who  with  me 
share  this  loyalty,  and  to  whom  this  loyalty,  if 
complete,  is  also  a  supreme  good.  So  far, 
then,  in  being  loyal  myself,  I  not  only  get  but 
give  good;  for  I  help  to  sustain,  in  each  of 
my  fellow-servants,  his  own  loyalty,  and  so  I 
help  him  to  secure  his  own  supreme  good. 
In  so  far,  then,  my  loyalty  to  my  cause  is  also 
a  loyalty  to  my  fellows'  loyalty.  But  now 
suppose  that  my  cause,  like  the  family  in  a 
feud,  or  like  the  pirate  ship,  or  like  the  aggres- 
sively warlike  nation,  lives  by  the  destruction 
of  the  loyalty  of  other  families,  or  of  its  own 
community,  or  of  other  communities.  Then, 
indeed,  I  get  a  good  for  myself  and  for  my 
fellow-servants  by  our  common  loyalty;  but 
I  war  against  this  very  spirit  of  loyalty  as  it 
appears  in  our  opponent's  loyalty  to  his  own 
cause. 

And  so,  a  cause  is  good,  not  only  for  me, 
but  for  mankind,  in  so  far  as  it  is  essentially 
a  loyalty  to  loyalty,  that  is,  is  an  aid  and  a 
furtherance  of  loyalty  in  'my  fellows.     It  is  an 

118 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

evil  cause  in  so  far  as,  despite  the  loyalty 
that  it  arouses  in  me,  it  is  destructive  of  loy- 
alty in  the  world  of  my  fellows.  My  cause 
is,  indeed,  always  such  as  to  involve  some 
loyalty  to  loyalty,  because,  if  I  am  loyal  to 
any  cause  at  all,  I  have  fellow-servants  whose 
loyalty  mine  supports.  But  in  so  far  as  my 
cause  is  a  predatory  cause,  which  lives  by 
overthrowing  the  loyalties  of  others,  it  is  an 
evil  cause,  because  it  involves  disloyalty  to 
the  very  cause  of  loyalty  itself. 

IV 

In  view  of  these  considerations,  we  are 
now  able  still  further  to  simplify  our  problem 
by  laying  stress  upon  one  more  of  those  very 
features  which  seemed,  but  a  moment  since,  to 
complicate  the  matter  so  hopelessly.  Loy- 
alty, as  we  have  defined  it,  is  the  willing  de- 
votion of  a  self  to  a  cause.  In  answering  the 
ethical  individualists,  we  have  insisted  that 
all  of  the  higher  types  of  loyalty  involve  auton- 
omous choice.  The  cause  that  is  to  appeal 
to  me  at  all  must  indeed  have  some  elemental 

119 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

fascination  for  me.  It  must  stir  me,  arouse 
me,  please  me,  and  in  the  end  possess  me. 
Moreover,  it  must,  indeed,  be  set  before  me 
by  my  social  order  as  a  possible,  a  practically 
significant,  a  living  cause,  which  binds  many 
selves  in  the  unity  of  one  life.  But,  never- 
theless, if  I  am  really  awake  to  the  signifi- 
cance of  my  own  moral  choices,  I  must  be  in 
the  position  of  accepting  this  cause,  as  the 
Speaker  of  the  House,  in  the  incident  that  I 
have  narrated,  had  freely  accepted  his  Speak- 
ership. My  cause  cannot  be  merely  forced 
upon  me.  It  is  I  who  make  it  my  own.  It  is 
I  who  willingly  say:  "I  have  no  eyes  to  see 
nor  tongue  to  speak  save  as  this  cause  shall 
command."  However  much  the  cause  may 
seem  to  be  assigned  to  me  by  my  social  sta- 
tion, I  must  cooperate  in  the  choice  of  the 
cause,  before  the  act  of  loyalty  is  complete. 

Since  this  is  the  case,  since  my  loyalty  never 
is  my  mere  fate,  but  is  always  also  my  choice, 
I  can  of  course  determine  my  loyalty,  at  least 
to  some  extent,  by  the  consideration  of  the 
actual  good  and  ill  which  my  proposed  cause 

120 


LOYALTY   TO    LOYALTY 

does  to  mankind.  And  since  I  now  have  the 
main  criterion  of  the  good  and  ill  of  causes 
before  me,  I  can  define  a  principle  of  choice 
which  may  so  guide  me  that  my  loyalty  shall 
become  a  good,  not  merely  to  myself,  but  to 
mankind. 

This  principle  is  now  obvious.  I  may 
state  it  thus :  In  so  far  as  it  lies  in  your  power, 
so  choose  your  cause  and  so  serve  it,  that,  by 
reason  of  your  choice  and  of  your  service, 
there  shall  be  more  loyalty  in  the  world  rather 
than  less.  And,  in  fact,  so  choose  and 
so  serve  your  individual  cause  as  to  secure 
thereby  the  greatest  possible  increase  of  loy- 
alty amongst  men.  More  briefly:  In  choos- 
ing and  in  serving  the  cause  to  which  you  are 
to  be  loyal,  be,  in  any  case,  loyal  to  loyalty. 

This  precept,  I  say,  will  express  how  one 
should  guide  his  choice  of  a  cause,  in  so  far  as 
he  considers  not  merely  his  own  supreme 
good,  but  that  of  mankind.  That  such  auton- 
omous choice  is  possible,  tends,  as  we  now 
see,  not  to  complicate,  but  to  simplify  our  moral 
situation.     For  if  you   regard   men's   loyalty 

121 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

as  their  fate,  if  you  think  that  a  man  must  be 
loyal  simply  to  the  cause  which  tradition  sets 
before  him,  without  any  power  to  direct  his 
own  moral  attention,  then  indeed  the  conflict 
of  loyalties  seems  an  insoluble  problem;  so 
that,  if  men  find  themselves  loyally  involved 
in  feuds,  there  is  no  way  out.  But  if,  indeed, 
choice  plays  a  part,  — a  genuine  even  if 
limited  part,  in  directing  the  individual's 
choice  of  the  cause  to  which  he  is  to  be  loyal, 
then  indeed  this  choice  may  be  so  directed 
that  loyalty  to  the  universal  loyalty  of  all 
mankind  shall  be  furthered  by  the  actual 
choices  which  each  enlightened  loyal  person 
makes  when  he  selects  his  cause. 


At  the  close  of  our  first  discussion  we  sup- 
posed the  question  to  be  asked,  Where,  in  all 
our  complex  and  distracted  modern  world,  in 
which  at  present  cause  wars  with  cause,  shall 
we  find  a  cause  that  is  certainly  worthy  of 
our  loyalty?  This  question,  at  this  very 
moment,   has  received  in   our  discussion   an 

122 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

answer  which  you  may  feel  to  be  so  far  pro- 
visional, —  perhaps  unpractical,  — but  which 
you  ought  to  regard  as,  at  least  in  principle, 
somewhat  simple  and  true  to  human  nature. 
Loyalty  is  a  good,  a  supreme  good.  If  I  my- 
self could  but  find  a  worthy  cause,  and  serve  it 
as  the  Speaker  served  the  House,  having  nei- 
ther eyes  to  see  nor  tongue  to  speak  save  as 
that  cause  should  command,  then  my  highest 
human  good,  in  so  far  as  I  am  indeed  an  active 
being,  would  be  mine.  But  this  very  good  of 
loyalty  is  no  peculiar  privilege  of  mine;  nor 
is  it  good  only  for  me.  It  is  an  universally 
human  good.  For  it  is  simply  the  finding  of 
a  harmony  of  the  self  and  the  world,  — such 
a  harmony  as  alone  can  content  any  human 
being. 

In  these  lectures  I  do  not  found  my  ar- 
gument upon  some  remote  ideal.  I  found 
my  case  upon  taking  our  poor  passionate 
human  nature  just  as  we  find  it.  This  "eager 
anxious  being"  of  ours,  as  Gray  calls  it,  is 
a  being  that  we  can  find  only  in  social  ties, 
and  that   we,   nevertheless,   can    never   fulfil 

123 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

without  a  vigorous  self-assertion.  We  are  by 
nature  proud,  untamed,  restless,  insatiable  in 
our  private  self-will.  We  are  also  imitative, 
plastic,  and  in  bitter  need  of  ties.  We  pro- 
foundly want  both  to  rule  and  to  be  ruled. 
We  must  be  each  of  us  at  the  centre  of  his 
own  active  world,  and  yet  each  of  us  longs 
to  be  in  harmony  with  the  very  outermost 
heavens  that  encompass,  with  the  lofty  order- 
liness of  their  movements,  all  our  restless 
doings.  The  stars  fascinate  us,  and  yet  we 
also  want  to  keep  our  own  feet  upon  our  solid 
human  earth.  Our  fellows,  meanwhile,  over- 
whelm us  with  the  might  of  their  customs, 
and  we  in  turn  are  inflamed  with  the  natu- 
rally unquenchable  longing  that  they  should 
somehow  listen  to  the  cries  of  our  every  in- 
dividual desire. 

Now  this  divided  being  of  ours  demands 
reconciliation  with  itself ;  it  is  one  long  strug- 
gle for  unity.  Its  inner  and  outer  realms  are 
naturally  at  war.  Yet  it  wills  both  realms. 
It  wants  them  to  become  one.  Such  unity, 
however,  only   loyalty  furnishes  to  us,  — loy- 

124 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

alty,  which  finds  the  inner  self  intensified  and 
exalted  even  by  the  very  act  of  outward  look- 
ing and  of  upward  looking,  of  service  and 
obedience,  —  loyalty,  which  knows  its  eyes  and 
its  tongue  to  be  never  so  much  and  so  proudly 
its  own  as  when  it  earnestly  insists  that  it  can 
neither  see  nor  speak  except  as  the  cause  de- 
mands,— loyalty,  which  is  most  full  of  life  at  the 
instant  when  it  is  most  ready  to  become  weary, 
or  even  to  perish  in  the  act  of  devotion  to  its 
own.  /Such  loyalty  unites  private  passion  and 
outward  conformity  in  one  life/  This  is  the 
very  essence  of  loyalty.  Now  loyalty  has  these 
characters  in  any  man  who  is  loyal.  Its 
emotions  vary,  indeed,  endlessly  with  the 
temperaments  of  its  adherents;  but  to  them 
all  it  brings  the  active  peace  of  that  rest  in  \l 
painful  life,  —  that  rest  such  as  we  found  the 
mystic,  Meister  Eckhart,  fully  ready  to  prize. 
Loyalty,  then,  is  a  good  for  all  men.  And 
it  is  in  any  man  just  as  much  a  true  good  as 
my  loyalty  could  be  in  me.  And  so,  then,  if 
indeed  I  seek  a  cause,  a  worthy  cause, 
what  cause  could  be  more  worthy  than  the 

125 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

cause  of  loyalty  to  loyalty;  that  is,  the 
cause  of  making  loyalty  prosper  amongst 
men?  If  I  could  serve  that  cause  in  a  sus- 
tained and  effective  life,  if  some  practical 
work  for  the  furtherance  of  universal  human 
loyalty  could  become  to  me  what  the  House 
was  to  the  Speaker,  then  indeed  my  own  life- 
task  would  be  found;  and  I  could  then  be 
assured  at  every  instant  of  the  worth  of  my 
cause  by  virtue  of  the  very  good  that  I  per- 
sonally found  in  its  service. 

Here  would  be  for  me  not  only  an  unity  of 
inner  and  outer,  but  an  unity  with  the  unity  of 
all  human  life.  What  I  sought  for  myself  I 
should  then  be  explicitly  seeking  for  my  whole 
world.  All  men  would  be  my  fellow-servants 
of  my  cause.  In  principle  I  should  be  opposed 
to  no  man's  loyalty.  I  should  be  opposed  only 
to  men's  blindness  in  their  loyalty,  I  should 
contend  only  against  that  tragic  disloyalty  to 
loyalty  which  the  feuds  of  humanity  now 
exemplify.  I  should  preach  to  all  others,  I 
should  strive  to  practise  myself,  that  active 
mutual  furtherance  of  universal  loyalty  which 

126 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

is  what  humanity  obviously  most  needs,  if 
indeed  loyalty,  just  as  the  willing  devotion  of 
a  self  to  a  cause,  is  a  supreme  good. 

And  since  all  who  are  human  are  as  capable 
of  loyalty  as  they  are  of  reason,  since  the 
plainest  and  the  humblest  can  be  as  true- 
hearted  as  the  great,  I  should  nowhere  miss 
the  human  material  for  my  task.  I  should 
know,  meanwhile,  that  if  indeed  loyalty,  unlike 
the  "mercy"  of  Portia's  speech,  is  not  always 
mightiest  in  the  mightiest,  it  certainly,  like 
mercy,  becomes  the  throned  monarch  better 
than  his  crown.  So  that  I  should  be  sure  of 
this  good  of  loyalty  as  something  worthy  to 
be  carried,  so  far  as  I  could  carry  it,  to  every- 
body, lofty  or  humble. 

Thus  surely  it  would  be  humane  and  reason- 
able for  me  to  define  my  cause  to  myself,  — 
if  only  I  could  be  assured  that  there  is  indeed 
some  practical  way  of  making  loyalty  to 
loyalty  the  actual  cause  of  my  life.  Our 
question  therefore  becomes  this :  Is  there  a 
practical  way  of  serving  the  universal  human 
cause  of  loyalty  to  loyalty?     And  if  there  is 

127 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

such  a  way,  what  is  it  ?  Can  we  see  how  per- 
sonally so  to  act  that  we  bring  loyalty  on 
earth  to  a  fuller  fruition,  to  a  wider  range  of 
efficacy,  to  a  more  effective  sovereignty  over 
the  lives  of  men  ?  If  so,  then  indeed  we  can 
see  how  to  work  for  the  cause  of  the  genuine 
kingdom  of  heaven. 

VI 

Yet  I  fear  that  as  you  have  listened  to  this 
sketch  of  a  possible  and  reasonable  cause, 
such  as  could  be  a  proper  object  of  our  loy- 
alty, you  will  all  the  while  have  objected: 
This  may  be  a  definition  of  a  possible  cause, 
but  it  is  an  unpractical  definition.  For  what 
is  there  that  one  can  do  to  further  the  loyalty 
of  mankind  in  general  ?  Humanitarian  efforts 
are  an  old  story.  They  constantly  are  limited 
in  their  effectiveness  both  by  the  narrowness 
of  our  powers,  and  by  the  complexity  of  the 
human  nature  which  we  try  to  improve.  And 
if  any  lesson  of  philanthropy  is  well  known, 
it  is  this,  that  whoever  tries  simply  to  help 
mankind  as  a  whole,  loses  his  labor,  so  long  as 

128 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

he  does  not  first  undertake  to  help  those  near- 
est to  him.  Loyalty  to  the  cause  of  universal 
loyalty  — how,  then,  shall  it  constitute  any 
practical  working  scheme  of  life  ? 

I  answer  at  once  that  the  individual  man, 
with  his  limited  powers,  can  indeed  serve  the 
cause  of  universal  loyalty  only  by  limiting  his 
undertakings  to  some  decidedly  definite  per- 
sonal range.  He  must  have  his  own  special 
and  personal  cause.  But  this  cause  of  his 
can  indeed  be  chosen  and  determined  so  as  to 
constitute  a  deliberate  effort  to  further  uni- 
versal loyalty.  When  I  begin  to  show  you 
how  this  may  be,  I  shall  at  once  pass  from 
what  may  have  seemed  to  you  a  very  unprac- 
tical scheme  of  life,  to  a  realm  of  familiar 
and  commonplace  virtuous  activities.  The 
only  worth  of  my  general  scheme  will  then  lie 
in  the  fact  that,  in  the  light  of  this  scheme,  we 
can,  as  it  were,  see  the  commonplace  virtues 
transfigured  and  glorified  by  their  relation  to 
the  one  highest  cause  of  all.  My  thesis  is 
that  all  the  commonplace  virtues,  in  so  far  as 
they   are   indeed   defensible   and   effective,    are 

k  129 


THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF   LOYALTY 

special  forms  of  loyalty  to  loyalty,  and  are  to  be 
justified,  centralized,  inspired,  by  the  one  su- 
preme effort  to  do  good,  namely,  the  effort  to 
make  loyalty  triumphant  in  the  lives  of  all  men. 
The  first  consideration  which  I  shall  here 
insist  upon  is  this:  Loyalty,  as  we  have  all 
along  seen,  depends  upon  a  very  character- 
istic and  subtle  union  of  natural  interest,  and 
of  free  choice.  Nobody  who  merely  follows 
his  natural  impulses  as  they  come  is  loyal. 
Yet  nobody  can  be  loyal  without  depending 
upon  and  using  his  natural  impulses.  If  I 
am  to  be  loyal,  my  cause  must  from  moment 
to  moment  fascinate  me,  awaken  my  muscular 
vigor,  stir  me  with  some  eagerness  for  work, 
even  if  this  be  painful  work.  I  cannot  be 
loyal  to  barren  abstractions.  I  can  only  be 
loyal  to  what  my  life  can  interpret  in  bodily 
deeds.  Loyalty  has  its  elemental  appeal  to 
my  whole  organism.  My  cause  must  become 
one  with  my  human  life.  Yet  all  this  must 
occur  not  without  my  willing  choice.  I  must 
control  my  devotion.  It  will  possess  me,  but 
not  without  my  voluntary  complicity;    for  I 

130 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

shall  accept  the  possession.  It  is,  then,  with 
the  cause  to  which  you  personally  are  loyal,  as 
it  was  with  divine  grace  in  an  older  theology. 
The  cause  must  control  you,  as  divine  grace 
took  saving  control  of  the  sinner;  but  only 
your  own  will  can  accept  this  control,  and  a 
grace  that  merely  compels  can  never  save. 

Now  that  such  an  union  of  choice  with 
natural  interest  is  possible,  is  a  fact  of  human 
nature,  which  every  act  of  your  own,  in  your 
daily  calling,  may  be  used  to  exemplify.  You 
cannot  do  steady  work  without  natural  in- 
terest; but  whoever  is  the  mere  prey  of  this 
passing  interest  does  no  steady  work.  Loy- 
alty is  a  perfect  synthesis  of  certain  natural 
desires,  of  some  range  of  social  conformity, 
and  of  your  own  deliberate  choice. 

In  order  to  be  loyal,  then,  to  loyalty,  I  must 
indeed  first  choose  forms  of  loyal  conduct 
which  appeal  to  my  own  nature.  This  means 
that,  upon  one  side  of  my  life,  I  shall  have  to 
behave  much  as  the  most  unenlightened  of 
the  loyal  do.  I  shall  serve  causes  such  as  my 
natural   temperament   and   my  social   oppor- 

131 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

tunities  suggest  to  me.  I  shall  choose  friends 
whom  I  like.  My  family,  my  community, 
my  country,  will  be  served  partly  because  I 
find  it  interesting  to  be  loyal  to  them. 

Nevertheless,  upon  another  side,  all  these 
my  more  natural  and,  so  to  speak,  accidental 
loyalties,  will  be  controlled  and  unified  by  a 
deliberate  use  of  the  principle  that,  whatever 
my  cause,  it  ought  to  be  such  as  to  further, 
so  far  as  in  me  lies,  the  cause  of  universal 
loyalty.  Hence  I  shall  not  permit  my  choice 
of  my  special  causes  to  remain  a  mere  chance. 
My  causes  must  form  a  system.  They  must 
constitute  in  their  entirety  a  single  cause,  my 
life  of  loyalty.  When  apparent  conflicts  arise 
amongst  the  causes  in  which  I  am  interested, 
I  shall  deliberately  undertake,  by  devices 
which  we  shall  hereafter  study  in  these  lec- 
tures, to  reduce  the  conflict  to  the  greatest 
possible  harmony.  Thus,  for  instance,  I  may 
say,  to  one  of  the  causes  in  which  I  am  natu- 
rally bound  up :  — 

"  I  could  not  love  thee,  dear,  so  much, 
Loved  I  not  honour  more.'* 

132 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

And  in  this  familiar  spirit  my  loyalty  will  aim 
to  be,  even  within  the  limits  of  my  own  per- 
sonal life,  an  united,  harmonious  devotion, 
not  to  various  conflicting  causes,  but  to  one 
system  of  causes,  and  so  to  one  cause. 

Since  this  one  cause  is  my  choice,  the  cause 
of  my  life,  my  social  station  will  indeed  sug- 
gest it  to  me.  My  natural  powers  and  pref- 
erences will  make  it  fascinating  to  me,  and 
yet  I  will  never  let  mere  social  routine,  or 
mere  social  tradition,  or  mere  private  caprice, 
impose  it  upon  me.  I  will  be  individualistic 
in  my  loyalty,  carefully  insisting,  however, 
that  whatever  else  I  am,  I  shall  be  in  all  my 
practical  activity  a  loyal  individual,  and,  so 
far  as  in  me  lies,  one  who  chooses  his  per- 
sonal causes  for  the  sake  of  the  spread  of 
universal  loyalty.  Moreover,  my  loyalty  will 
be  a  growing  loyalty.  Without  giving  up 
old  loyalties  I  shall  annex  new  ones.  There 
will  be  evolution  in  my  loyalty. 

The  choice  of  my  cause  will  in  consequence 
be  such  as  to  avoid  unnecessary  conflict  with 
the  causes  of  others.     So  far  I  shall  indeed 

133 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

negatively  show  loyalty  to  loyalty.  It  shall 
not  be  my  cause  to  destroy  other  men's  loyalty. 
Yet  since  my  cause,  thus  chosen  and  thus 
organized,  still  confines  me  to  my  narrow 
personal  range,  and  since  I  can  do  so  little 
directly  for  mankind,  you  may  still  ask  whether, 
by  such  a  control  of  my  natural  interests,  I 
am  indeed  able  to  do  much  to  serve  the  cause 
of  universal  loyalty. 

Well,  it  is  no  part  of  the  plan  of  this  dis- 
course to  encourage  illusions  about  the  range 
of  influence  that  any  one  poor  mortal  can 
exert.  But  that  by  the  mere  force  of  my  prac- 
tical and  personal  loyalty,  if  I  am  indeed  loyal, 
I  am  doing  something  for  the  cause  of  universal 
loyalty,  however  narrow  my  range  of  deeds, 
this  a  very  little  experience  of  the  lives  of 
other  people  tends  to  teach  me.  For  who, 
after  all,  most  encourages  and  incites  me  to 
loyalty?  I  answer,  any  loyal  human  being, 
whatever  his  cause,  so  long  as  his  cause  does 
not  arouse  my  hatred,  and  does  not  directly 
injure  my  chance  to  be  loyal.  My  fellow's 
special  and  personal  cause  need  not  be  directly 

134 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

mine.  Indirectly  he  inspires  me  by  the  very 
contagion  of  his  loyalty.  He  sets  me  the 
example.  By  his  loyalty  he  shows  me  the 
worth  of  loyalty.  Those  humble  and  obscure 
folk  of  whom  I  have  before  spoken,  how  pre- 
cious they  are  to  us  all  as  inspiring  examples, 
because  of  their  loyalty  to  their  own. 

From  what  men,  then,  have  I  gained  the 
best  aid  in  discovering  how  to  be  myself 
loyal  ?  From  the  men  whose  personal  cause 
is  directly  and  consciously  one  with  my  own  ? 
That  is  indeed  sometimes  the  case.  But  others, 
whose  personal  causes  were  apparently  remote 
in  very  many  ways  from  mine,  have  helped 
me  to  some  of  my  truest  glimpses  of  loyalty. 

For  instance:  There  was  a  friend  of  my 
own  youth  whom  I  have  not  seen  for  years, 
who  once  faced  the  choice  between  a  schol- 
arly career  that  he  loved,  on  the  one  hand,  and 
a  call  of  honor,  upon  the  other,  — who  could 
have  lived  out  that  career  with  worldly  success 
if  he  had  only  been  willing  to  conspire  with 
his  chief  to  deceive  the  public  about  a  matter 
of  fact,  but  who  unhesitatingly  was  loyal  to 

135 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

loyalty,  who  spoke  the  truth,  who  refused  to 
conspire,  and  who,  because  his  chief  was  a 
plausible  and  powerful  man,  thus  delib- 
erately wrecked  his  own  worldly  chances  once 
for  all,  and  retired  into  a  misunderstood  ob- 
scurity in  order  that  his  fellow-men  might 
henceforth  be  helped  to  respect  the  truth 
better.  Now,  the  worldly  career  which  that 
friend  thus  sacrificed  for  the  sake  of  his  loy- 
alty is  far  from  mine ;  the  causes  that  he  has 
since  loyally  served  have  not  of  late  brought 
him  near  to  me  in  worldly  doings.  I  am  not 
sure  that  we  should  ever  have  kept  our  inter- 
ests in  close  touch  with  one  another  even  if  we 
had  lived  side  by  side.  For  he  was  and  is  a 
highly  specialized  type  of  man,  austere,  and  a 
little  disposed,  like  many  scholars,  to  a  life 
apart.  For  the  rest,  I  have  never  myself 
been  put  in  such  a  place  as  his  was  when  he 
chose  to  make  his  sacrifice,  and  have  never 
had  his  great  choice  set  before  me.  Nor  has 
the  world  rewarded  him  at  all  fairly  for  his 
fidelity.  He  is,  then,  as  this  world  goes,  not 
now  near  to  me  and  not  a  widely  influential 

136 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

man.  Yet  I  owe  him  a  great  debt.  He 
showed  me,  by  the  example  of  his  free  sacri- 
fice, a  good  in  loyalty  which  I  might  other- 
wise have  been  too  blind  to  see.  He  is  a  man 
who  does  not  love  flattery.  It  would  be  use- 
less for  me  now  to  offer  to  him  either  words 
of  praise  or  words  of  comfort.  He  made  his 
choice  with  a  single  heart  and  a  clear  head, 
and  he  has  always  declined  to  be  praised.  But 
it  will  take  a  long  time,  in  some  other  world, 
should  I  meet  him  in  such  a  realm,  to  tell  him 
how  much  I  owe  to  his  example,  how  much  he 
inspired  me,  or  how  many  of  his  fellows  he  had 
indirectly  helped  to  their  own  loyalty.  For  I 
believe  that  a  good  many  others  besides  myself 
indirectly  owe  far  more  to  him  than  he  knows, 
or  than  they  know.  I  believe  that  certain 
standards  of  loyalty  and  of  scientific  truth- 
fulness in  this  country  are  to-day  higher  than 
they  were  because  of  the  self -surrendering  act 
of  that  one  devoted  scholar. 

Loyalty,  then,  is  contagious.  It  infects  not 
only  the  fellow-servant  of  your  own  special 
cause,   but   also   all   who   know   of  this   act. 

137 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

Loyalty  is  a  good  that  spreads.  Live  it  and 
you  thereby  cultivate  it  in  other  men.  Be 
faithful,  then,  so  one  may  say,  to  the  loyal  man ; 
be  faithful  over  your  few  things,  for  the  spirit 
of  loyalty,  secretly  passing  from  you  to  many 
to  whom  you  are  a  stranger,  may  even  thereby 
make  you  unconsciously  ruler  over  many 
things.  Loyalty  to  loyalty  is  then  no  unprac- 
tical cause.  And  you  serve  it  not  by  becom- 
ing a  mere  citizen  of  the  world,  but  by  serving 
your  own  personal  cause.  We  set  before  you, 
then,  no  unpractical  rule  when  we  repeat  our 
moral  formula  in  this  form :  Find  your  own 
cause,  your  interesting,  fascinating,  personally 
engrossing  cause ;  serve  it  with  all  your  might 
and  soul  and  strength;  but  so  choose  your 
cause,  and  so  serve  it,  that  thereby  you  show 
forth  your  loyalty  to  loyalty,  so  that  because  of 
your  choice  and  service  of  your  cause,  there  is 
a  maximum  of  increase  of  loyalty  amongst 
your  fellow-men. 

VII 
Yet  herewith  we  have  only  begun  to  indi- 
cate how  the  cause  of  loyalty  to  loyalty  may 

138 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

be  made  a  cause  that  one  can  practically, 
efficaciously,  and  constantly  serve.  Loyalty, 
namely,  is  not  a  matter  merely  of  to-day  or  of 
yesterday.  The  loyal  have  existed  since  civ- 
ilization began.  And,  even  so,  loyalty  to 
loyalty  is  not  a  novel  undertaking.  It  began 
to  be  efttctive  from  the  time  when  first  people 
could  make  and  keep  a  temporary  truce  dur- 
ing a  war,  and  when  first  strangers  were  re- 
garded as  protected  by  the  gods,  and  when 
first  the  duties  of  hospitality  were  recognized. 
The  way  to  be  loyal  to  loyalty  is  therefore 
laid  down  in  precisely  the  rational  portion  of 
the  conventional  morality  which  human  ex- 
perience has  worked  out. 

Herewith  we  approach  a  thesis  which  is 
central  in  my  whole  philosophy  of  loyalty. 
I  announced  that  thesis  in  other  words  in  the 
opening  lecture.  My  thesis  is  that  all  those 
duties  which  we  have  learned  to  recognize  as 
the  fundamental  duties  of  the  civilized  man, 
the  duties  that  every  man  owes  to  every  man, 
are  to  be  rightly  interpreted  as  special  in- 
stances of  loyalty  to  loyalty.      In  other  words, 

139 


\s 


i 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

all  the  recognized  virtues  can  be  defined  in 
terms  of  our  concept  of  loyalty.  And  this  is 
why  I  assert  that,  when  rightly  interpreted, 
loyalty  is  the  whole  duty  of  man. 

For  consider  the  best-known  facts  as  to  the 
indirect  influence  of  certain  forms  of  loyal 
conduct.  When  I  speak  the  truth,  my  act  is 
directly  an  act  of  loyalty  to  the  personal  tie 
which  then  and  there  binds  me  to  the  man  to 
whom  I  consent  to  speak.  My  special  cause 
is,  in  such  a  case,  constituted  by  this  tie.  My 
fellow  and  I  are  linked  in  a  certain  unity, — 
the  unity  of  some  transaction  which  involves 
our  speech  one  to  another.  To  be  ready  to 
speak  the  truth  to  my  fellow  is  to  have,  just 
then,  no  eye  to  see  and  no  tongue  to  speak  save 
as  this  willingly  accepted  tie  demands.  In 
so  far,  then,  speaking  the  truth  is  a  special 
instance  of  loyalty.  But  whoever  speaks  the 
truth,  thereby  does  what  he  then  can  do  to 
help  everybody  to  speak  the  truth.  For  he 
acts  so  as  to  further  the  general  confidence 
of  man  in  man.  How  far  such  indirect  in- 
fluence may  extend,  no  man  can  predict. 

140 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

Precisely  so,  in  the  commercial  world,  hon- 
esty in  business  is  a  service,  not  merely  and 
not  mainly  to  the  others  who  are  parties  to 
the  single  transaction  in  which  at  any  one 
time  this  faithfulness  is  shown.  The  single 
act  of  business  fidelity  is  an  act  of  loyalty  to 
that  general  confidence  of  man  in  man  upon 
which  the  whole  fabric  of  business  rests. 
On  the  contrary,  the  unfaithful  financier 
whose  disloyalty  is  the  final  deed  that  lets 
loose  the  avalanche  of  a  panic,  has  done  far 
more  harm  to  general  public  confidence  than 
he  could  possibly  do  to  those  whom  his  act 
directly  assails.  Honesty,  then,  is  owed  not 
merely  and  not  even  mainly  to  those  with 
whom  we  directly  deal  when  we  do  honest 
acts;  it  is  owed  to  mankind  at  large,  and  it 
benefits  the  community  and  the  general  cause 
of  commercial  loyalty. 

Such  a  remark  is  in  itself  a  commonplace; 
but  it  serves  to  make  concrete  my  general  the- 
sis that  every  form  of  dutiful  action  is  a  case  of 
loyalty  to  loyalty.  For  what  holds  thus  of 
truthfulness  and  of  commercial  honesty  holds, 

141       & 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  LOYALTY 

I  assert,  of  every  form  of  dutiful  action.  Each 
such  form  is  a  special  means  for  being,  by  a 
concrete  deed,  loyal  to  loyalty. 

We  have  sought  for  the  worthy  cause ;  and 
we  have  found  it.  This  simplest  possible  of 
considerations  serves  to  turn  the  chaotic 
mass  of  separate  precepts  of  which  our  ordi- 
nary conventional  moral  code  consists  into 
a  system  unified  by  the  one  spirit  of  universal 
loyalty.  By  your  individual  deed  you  indeed 
cannot  save  the  world,  but  you  can  at  any 
moment  do  what  in  you  lies  to  further  the 
cause  which  both  for  you  and  for  the  human 
world  constitutes  the  supreme  good,  namely, 
the  cause  of  universal  loyalty.  Herein  con- 
sists your  entire  duty. 

Review  in  the  light  of  this  simple  considera- 
tion, the  usually  recognized  range  of  human 
duties.  How  easily  they  group  themselves 
about  the  one  principle :   Be  loyal  to  loyalty. 

Have  I,  for  instance,  duties  to  myself? 
Yes,  precisely  in  so  far  as  I  have  the  duty  to 
be  actively  loyal  at  all.  For  loyalty  needs  not 
only  a  willing,  but  also  an  effective  servant. 

142 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

My  duty  to  myself  is,  then,  the  duty  to  pro- 
vide my  cause  with  one  who  is  strong  enough 
and  skilful  enough  to  be  effective  according 
to  my  own  natural  powers.  The  care  of 
health,  self-cultivation,  self-control,  spiritual 
power  —  these  are  all  to  be  morally  estimated 
with  reference  to  the  one  principle  that,  since 
I  have  no  eyes  to  see  or  tongue  to  speak  save  as 
the  cause  commands,  I  will  be  as  worthy  an 
instrument  of  the  cause  as  can  be  made,  by 
my  own  efforts,  out  of  the  poor  material  which 
my  scrap  of  human  nature  provides.  The 
highest  personal  cultivation  for  which  I  have 
time  is  thus  required  by  our  principle.  But 
self-cultivation  which  is  not  related  to  loyalty 
is  worthless. 

Have  I  private  and  personal  rights,  which 
I  ought  to  assert?  Yes,  precisely  in  so  far 
as  my  private  powers  and  possessions  are 
held  in  trust  for  the  cause,  and  are,  upon 
occasion,  to  be  defended  for  the  sake  of  the 
cause.  My  rights  are  morally  the  outcome 
of  my  loyalty.  It  is  my  right  to  protect  my 
service,  to  maintain  my  office,  and  to  keep 

143 


THE  PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

my  own  merely  in  order  that  I  may  use  my 
own  as  the  cause  commands.  But  rights 
which  are  not  determined  by  my  loyalty 
are  vain  pretence. 

As  to  my  duties  to  my  neighbors,  these 
are  defined  by  a  well-known  tradition  in 
terms  of  two  principles,  justice  and  benevo- 
lence. These  two  principles  are  mere  aspects 
of  our  one  principle.  Justice  means,  in 
general,  fidelity  to  human  ties  in  so  far  as 
they  are  ties.  Justice  thus  concerns  itself 
with  what  may  be  called  the  mere  forms  in 
which  loyalty  expresses  itself.  Justice,  there- 
fore, is  simply  one  aspect  of  loyalty  —  the  more 
formal  and  abstract  side  of  loyal  life.  If 
you  are  just,  you  are  decisive  in  your  choice 
of  your  personal  cause,  you  are  faithful  to 
the  loyal  decision  once  made,  you  keep  your 
promise,  you  speak  the  truth,  you  respect 
the  loyal  ties  of  all  other  men,  and  you  con- 
tend with  other  men  only  in  so  far  as  the 
defence  of  your  own  cause,  in  the  interest  of 
loyalty  to  the  universal  cause  of  loyalty, 
makes    such    contest    against    aggression   un- 

144 


LOYALTY   TO   LOYALTY 

avoidable.  All  these  types  of  activity, 
within  the  limits  that  loyalty  determines,  are 
demanded  if  you  are  to  be  loyal  to  loyalty. 
Our  principle  thus  at  once  requires  them,  and 
enables  us  to  define  their  range  of  application. 
But  justice,  without  loyalty,  is  a  vicious  for- 
malism. 

Benevolence,  on  the  other  hand,  is  that 
aspect  of  loyalty  which  directly  concerns  itself 
with  your  influence  upon  the  inner  life  of 
human  beings  who  enjoy,  who  suffer,  and 
whose  private  good  is  to  be  affected  by  your 
deeds.  Since  no  personal  good  that  your 
fellow  can  possess  is  superior  to  his  own 
loyalty,  your  own  loyalty  to  loyalty  is  itself 
a  supremely  benevolent  type  of  activity. 
And  since  your  fellow-man  is  an  instrument 
for  the  furtherance  of  the  cause  of  universal 
loyalty,  his  welfare  also  concerns  you,  in  so 
far  as,  if  you  help  him  to  a  more  efficient  life, 
you  make  him  better  able  to  be  loyal.  Thus 
benevolence  is  an  inevitable  attendant  of 
loyalty.  And  the  spirit  of  loyalty  to  loy- 
alty enables  us  to  define  wherein  consists  a 

l  145 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

wise  benevolence.  Benevolence  without  loy- 
alty is  a  dangerous  sentimentalism.  Thus 
viewed,  then,  loyalty  to  universal  loyalty  is 
indeed  the  fulfilment  of  the  whole  law. 


146 


IV 

CONSCIENCE 


LECTURE  IV 

CONSCIENCE 

ONE  of  the  main  purposes  of  these  lectures 
is  to  simplify  our  conceptions  of  duty  and 
of  the  good.  When  I  am  in  a  practical  per- 
plexity, such  as  often  arises  in  daily  life,  that 
friend  can  best  advise  me  who  helps  me  to 
ignore  useless  complications,  to  see  simply 
and  directly,  to  look  at  the  central  facts  of 
my  situation.  And  even  so,  when  a  moral- 
ist attempts  a  rational  theory  of  duty,  he 
ought,  like  the  practical  adviser  of  a  friend 
in  perplexity,  to  do  what  he  can  to  rid  our 
moral  situation  of  its  confusing  complications. 
In  these  lectures  I  am  trying  to  accomplish 
this  end  by  centralizing  our  duties  about  the 
one  conception  of  loyalty. 

I 
Conventional    morality,    as    it    is    usually 
taught  to  us,  consists  of  a  maze  of  precepts. 
Some    of   these    precepts    we    have    acquired 

149 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF    LOYALTY 

through  the  influence  of  Christianity.  Some 
of  them  are  distinctly  unchristian,  or  even 
antichristian.  Whatever  their  origin,  whether 
Christian  or  Greek  or  barbarian,  they  lie 
side  by  side  in  our  minds;  and  sometimes 
they  tend  to  come  into  conflict  with  one 
another.  Be  just;  but  also  be  kind.  Be 
generous;  but  also  be  strict  in  demanding 
what  is  your  due.  Live  for  others;  but  be 
careful  of  your  own  dignity,  and  assert  your 
rights.  Love  all  mankind;  but  resent  in- 
sults, and  be  ready  to  slay  the  enemies  of 
your  country.  Take  no  thought  for  the 
morrow;  but  be  careful  to  save  and  to  in- 
sure. Cultivate  yourself ;  but  always  sacrifice 
yourself.  Forget  yourself;  but  never  be  so 
thoughtless  in  conduct  that  others  shall  justly 
say,  "You  have  forgotten  yourself."  Be  mod- 
erate in  all  things;  but  know  no  moderation 
in  your  devotion  to  righteousness.  Such  are 
a  few  of  the  well-known  paradoxes  of  our 
popular  morality.  And  these  paradoxes  are, 
for  the  most  part,  no  mere  accidents.  Nearly 
all  of  these  apparently  conflicting  moral  max- 

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CONSCIENCE 

ims  express  some  significant  truth.  What  we 
want  is  a  method  of  finding  our  way  through 
the  maze,  a  principle  that  shall  unify  our 
moral  life,  and  that  shall  enable  us  to  solve 
its  paradoxes. 

Such  a  centralizing  and  unifying  principle 
we  tried  to  propose  at  the  last  lecture.  Our 
topic  in  the  foregoing  discussion  was  the 
question :  By  what  criterion  may  we  know 
that  a  proposed  cause  is  one  which  is  worthy 
of  our  loyalty?  We  answered  the  question 
by  asserting  that  there  is  in  any  case  one 
cause  which  is  worthy  of  every  man's  loyalty. 
And  that  is  the  cause  of  loyalty  itself.  Do 
what  you  can  to  make  men  loyal,  and  to  keep 
them  in  a  loyal  attitude ;  this  was  the  sense  of 
the  general  precept  that  we  derived  from  our 
study  of  the  value  of  loyalty  to  those  who  are 
loyal.  Whoever  follows  this  precept  inevi- 
tably defines  for  himself  a  cause,  and  becomes 
loyal  to  that  cause.  His  sovereign  and  central 
moral  maxim  may  otherwise  be  stated  thus: 
Be  loyal  to  loyalty,    c  -  **Isf  ••.cy  i   Be 

Our  reasons  for  asserting  that  this  maxim 

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THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

is  a  sound  guide  to  dutiful  action  were  these : 
First,  the  primal  fact  that  loyalty,  in  any  man 
who  possesses  it,  is  his  supreme  good.  Sec- 
ondly, the  further  fact  that  such  loyalty  is  not 
a  good  which  only  a  few  are  able  to  get,  —  an 
aristocratic  possession  of  a  small  company  of 
saints ;  but  it  is,  on  the  contrary,  a  good  which 
is  accessible  to  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men, 
so  far  as  they  have  normal  human  interests 
and  normal  self-control.  We  saw  that  there 
is  no  sort  of  wholesome  human  life  which  does 
not  furnish  opportunities  for  loyalty.  And 
whoever  is  loyal  wins,  whatever  his  social 
station,  and  precisely  in  so  far  as  he  is  loyal, 
the  same  general  form  of  spiritual  fulfilment, 
namely,  self-possession  through  self -surrender. 
The  keeper  of  a  lonely  lighthouse  and  the 
leader  of  a  busy  social  order,  the  housemaid 
and  the  king,  have  almost  equal  opportunities 
to  devote  the  self  to  its  own  chosen  cause,  and 
to  win  the  good  of  such  devotion.  )  In  conse- 
quence of  these  two  considerations,  whoever 
undertakes  to  further  the  general  cause  of 
loyalty,   is   certainly   aiming  at   the   supreme 

152 


CONSCIENCE 

good  of  mankind  at  large.     His  cause,  there- 
fore, is  certainly  a  worthy  cause. 

Nor  is  the  undertaking  to  further  the  gen- 
eral cause  of  loyalty  itself  an  unpractical 
undertaking,  —  a  vague  philanthropy.  On 
the  contrary,  of  all  the  efforts  that  you  can 
make  on  behalf  of  your  fellow-men,  the  effort 
to  make  them  loyal  to  causes  of  their  own  is 
probably  the  most  generally  and  widely  prac- 
ticable. It  is  notoriously  hard,  by  any  direct 
philanthropic  effort,  to  give  good  fortune  to  any 
man,  except  to  some  few  of  those  with  whose 
fortunes  you  are  most  closely  linked.  Certain 
forms  of  suffering  can  be  relieved  by  the  hospi- 
tals, or  by  private  skill  and  kindness.  But 
when  the  sufferer  is  relieved,  he  stands  once 
more  merely  on  the  threshold  of  life,  and  the 
question,  What  can  you  do  to  give  him  life  it- 
self ?  is  not  yet  answered.  If,  hereupon,  you  try 
to  make  your  fellow-man  prosperous,  by  offer- 
ing to  him  unearned  good  fortune,  you  may  in 
fact  merely  teach  him  to  be  wasteful  and  in- 
dolent. If  you  seek  to  deal  out  happiness  to 
him  by  devices  of  your  own,  you  find  that  he 

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THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

generally  prefers  to  look  for  happiness  in  his 
own  way.  If  you  attempt  to  give  him  content- 
ment, you  come  into  conflict  with  his  insati- 
able natural  desires. 

But  if  you  undertake  to  make  him  loyal, 
there  is  indeed  much  that  you  can  do.  For, 
as  I  pointed  out  at  the  close  of  the  last  lecture, 
all  of  what  common  sense  rightly  regards  as 
your  ordinary  duties  to  mankind  may  be 
viewed,  and  ought  to  be  viewed,  as  prac- 
tically effective  ways  of  helping  on  the  cause 
of  general  loyalty.  Thus,  you  can  speak  the 
truth  to  your  fellow,  and  can  thereby  help 
him  to  a  better  confidence  in  mankind.  This 
confidence  in  mankind  will  aid  him  in  turn  to 
speak  the  truth  himself.  And  in  truth-speak- 
ing there  will  be  for  him  much  real  peace,  for 
truth-speaking  is  a  form  of  loyalty  and  will 
aid  him  to  be  otherwise  loyal  to  his  own.  Pre- 
cisely so,  there  are  as  many  other  ways  of 
helping  him  to  be  loyal  as  there  are  other 
such  obvious  and  commonly  recognized  du- 
ties to  be  done  in  your  ordinary  and  peaceful 
dealings  with  him. 

154 


CONSCIENCE 

Let  me  mention  one  further  instance  that 
was  not  used  amongst  our  illustrations  at  the 
last  meeting:  The  true  value  of  courtesy 
in  ordinary  human  intercourse  lies  in  the  fact 
that  courtesy  is  one  expression  of  loyalty  to 
loyalty,  and  helps  every  one  who  either  re- 
ceives or  witnesses  courtesy  to  assume  him- 
self a  loyal  attitude  towards  all  the  causes  that 
are  represented  by  the  peaceful  and  reasonable 
dealings  of  man  with  man.  The  forms  of 
courtesy,  in  fact,  are  largely  derived  from 
what  once  were,  or  still  are,  more  or  less  cere- 
monious expressions  of  loyal  devotion.  Cour- 
tesy, then,  may  be  defined  as  an  explicit  assump- 
tion of  a  loyal  bearing.  To  adopt  such  a 
bearing  with  a  real  sincerity  of  heart  is  to 
express,  in  your  passing  actions,  loyalty  to 
universal  loyalty.  To  act  thus  towards  your 
individual  fellow-man  is  then  and  there  to 
help  all  who  know  of  your  act  to  be  loyal. 
Courtesy,  then,  is  a  duty  owed  not  so  much  to 
the  individual  to  whom  you  are  courteous, 
as  to  humanity  at  large. 

There  are,  then,  many  ways  of  aiding  your 

155 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

fellow-man  to  be  loyal.  Now,  as  we  also 
set  forth  at  the  last  lecture,  one  of  the  most 
effective  of  these  ways  lies  in  being  loyal  your- 
self to  some  personally  chosen  and  determi- 
nate social  cause  which  constitutes  your  busi- 
ness. This  special  cause  need  not  be  one  in 
which  the  particular  fellow-man  whom  you 
are  just  now  to  help  is,  at  the  moment,  directly 
interested.  Your  very  loyalty  to  your  own 
cause  will  tend  to  prove  infectious.  Who- 
ever is  loyal  to  his  own  therefore  helps  on  the 
cause  of  universal  loyalty  by  his  every  act 
of  devotion,  precisely  in  so  far  as  he  refrains 
from  any  hostile  attack  upon  the  loyalty  of 
other  people,  and  simply  lets  his  example  of 
loyalty  work.  Whoever  makes  the  further- 
ance of  universal  loyalty  his  cause,  lacks, 
therefore,  neither  practical  means  nor  pres- 
ent opportunity  for  serving  his  cause. 

To  each  man  our  principle  therefore  says: 
Live  in  your  own  way  a  loyal  life  and  one 
subject  to  the  general  principle  of  loyalty  to 
loyalty.  Serve  your  own  cause,  but  so  choose 
it  and  so  serve  it  that  in  consequence  of  your 

156 


CONSCIENCE 

life  loyalty  amongst  men  shall  prosper.  For- 
tune may  indeed  make  the  range  of  your 
choice  of  your  calling  very  narrow.  Neces- 
sity may  bind  you  to  an  irksome  round  of 
tasks.  But  sweeten  these  with  whatever  loy- 
alty you  can  consistently  get  into  your  life. 
Let  loyalty  be  your  pearl  of  great  price.  Sell 
all  the  happiness  that  you  possess  or  can  get 
in  disloyal  or  in  non-loyal  activities,  and  buy 
that  pearl.  When  you  once  have  found,  or 
begun  to  find,  your  personal  cause,  be  as  stead- 
ily faithful  to  it  as  loyalty  to  loyalty  henceforth 
permits.  That  is,  if  you  find  that  a  cause 
once  chosen  does  indeed  involve  disloyalty 
to  loyalty,  as  one  might  find  who,  having 
sworn  fidelity  to  a  leader,  afterwards  discov- 
ered his  leader  to  be  a  traitor  to  the  cause 
of  mankind,  you  may  have  altogether  to 
abandon  the  cause  first  chosen.  But  never 
abandon  a  cause  except  for  the  sake  of  some 
higher  or  deeper  loyalty  such  as  actually 
requires  the  change. 

Meanwhile,    the    principle    of    loyalty    to 
loyalty  obviously  requires  you  to  respect  loyalty 

157 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

in  all  men,  wherever  you  find  it.  If  your 
fellow's  cause  has,  in  a  given  case,  assailed 
your  own,  and  if,  in  the  world  as  it  is,  conflict 
is  inevitable,  you  may  then  have  to  war  with 
your  fellow's  cause,  in  order  to  be  loyal  to 
your  own.  But  even  then,  you  may  never 
assail  whatever  is  sincere  and  genuine  about 
his  spirit  of  loyalty.  ;  Even  if  your  fellow's 
cause  involves  disloyalty  to  mankind  at  large, 
you  may  not  condemn  the  loyalty  of  your  fellow 
in  so  far  as  it  is  loyalty.  You  may  condemn 
only  his  blindly  chosen  cause)  All  the  loyal 
are  brethren.  They  are  children  of  one 
spirit.  Loyalty  to  loyalty  involves  the  active 
furtherance  of  this  spirit  wherever  it  appears. 
Fair  play  in  sport,  chivalrous  respect  for  the 
adversary  in  war,  tolerance  of  the  sincere 
beliefs  of  other  men,  — all  these  virtues  are 
thus  to  be  viewed  as  mere  variations  of  loy- 
alty to  loyalty.  Prevent  the  conflict  of  loyal- 
ties when  you  can,  minimize  such  conflict 
where  it  exists,  and,  by  means  of  fair  play 
and  of  the  chivalrous  attitude  towards  the 
opponent,   utilize   even   conflict,    where   it   is 

158 


CONSCIENCE 

inevitable,  so  as  to  further  the  cause  of  loyalty 
to  loyalty.  Such  maxims  are  obvious  conse- 
quences of  our  principle.  Do  we  not  gain, 
then,  a  great  deal  from  our  principle  in  the  way 
of  unifying  our  moral  code  ? 

II 

But  next,  as  to  those  just-mentioned  para- 
doxes of  popular  morality,  do  we  not  gain 
from  our  principle  a  guide  to  help  us  through 
the  maze?  "Be  just;  but  also  be  kind." 
These  two  precepts,  so  far  as  they  are  sound, 
merely  emphasize,  as  we  pointed  out  at  the 
close  of  our  last  lecture,  two  distinct  but 
inseparable  aspects  of  loyalty.  My  cause 
links  my  fellow  and  myself  by  social  ties 
which,  in  the  light  of  our  usual  human  inter- 
pretation of  life,  appear  to  stand  for  super- 
personal  interests, — for  interests  in  property 
rights,  in  formal  obligations,  in  promises,  in 
various  abstractly  definable  relations.  If  I 
am  loyal,  I  respect  these  relations.  And  I  do  so 
since,  from  the  very  definition  of  a  cause  to 
which  one  can  be  loyal,  this  cause  will  become 

159 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

nothing  unless  these  ties  are  preserved  intact. 
But  to  respect  relations  as  such  is  to  be  what 
men  call  just.  Meanwhile,  our  common  cause 
also  personally  interests  both  my  fellow  and 
myself.  So  far  as  we  both  know  the  cause, 
we  love  it,  and  delight  in  it.  Hence  in  being 
loyal  to  our  cause,  I  am  also  being  kind  to  my 
fellow.  For  hereby  I  further  his  delight  in 
just  so  far  as  I  help  him  to  insight.  But 
kindness  which  is  not  bound  up  with  loyalty 
is  as  a  sounding  brass  and  as  a  tinkling  cymbal, 
a  mere  sentimentalism.  And  abstract  justice, 
apart  from  loyalty,  is  a  cruel  formalism.  My 
fellow  wants  to  be  loyal.  This  is  his  deepest 
need.  If  I  am  loyal  to  that  need,  I  therefore 
truly  delight  him.  But  kindness  that  is  not 
bound  up  with  loyalty  may  indeed  amuse 
my  fellow  for  a  moment.  Yet  like  "fancy," 
such  kindness  "dies  in  the  cradle  where  it 
lies."  Even  so,  if  I  am  loyal,  I  am  also  just. 
But  justice  that  is  no  aspect  of  loyalty  has  no 
reason  for  existence.  The  true  relations  of 
benevolence  and  justice  can  therefore  be  best 
defined  in  terms  of  our  conception  of  loyalty. 

160 


CONSCIENCE 

If  any  one  says,  "I  will  show  thee  my  justice 
or  my  kindness  without  my  loyalty,"  the  loyal 
man  may  rightly  respond,  "  I  will  show  thee  my 
kindness  and  my  justice  by  my  loyalty." 

In  a  similar  fashion,  the  moral  problems 
regarding  the  right  relations  of  strictness  to 
generosity,  of  prudent  foresight  to  present 
confidence,  of  self -surrender  to  self-assertion, 
of  love  to  the  righteous  resistance  of  enemies, 
—  all  these  moral  problems,  I  say,  are  best  to 
be  solved  in  terms  of  the  principle  of  loyalty  to 
loyalty.  As  to  the  problem  of  the  true  concern 
and  regard  for  the  self,  the  loyal  man  culti- 
vates himself,  and  is  careful  of  his  property 
rights,  just  in  order  to  furnish  to  his  cause  an 
effective  instrument;  but  he  aims  to  forget 
precisely  so  much  of  himself  as  is,  at  any  time, 
an  obstruction  to  his  loyalty ;  and  he  also  aims 
to  be  careless  of  whatever  about  his  private 
fortunes  may  be  of  no  importance  to  his  ser- 
vice of  the  cause.  When  he  asserts  himself, 
he  does  so  because  he  has  neither  eyes  to  see  nor 
tongue  to  speak  save  as  his  cause  commands ; 
and  it  is  of  precisely  such  self-sacrificing  self- 

M  161 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

assertion  that  the  foes  of  his  cause  would  do 
well  to  beware.  All  the  paradoxes  about  the 
care  of  self  and  the  abandonment  of  self  are 
thus  soluble  in  terms  of  loyalty.  Whoever 
knows  and  possesses  the  loyal  attitude,  ipso 
facto  solves  these  paradoxes  in  each  special 
case  as  it  arises.  And  whoever  comprehends 
the  nature  of  loyalty  to  loyalty,  as  it  is  ex- 
pressed in  the  form  of  fair  play  in  sport,  of 
chivalry  in  war,  of  tolerance  in  belief,  and  of 
the  spirit  that  seeks  to  prevent  the  conflict  of 
loyalties  where  such  prevention  is  possible, 
—  whoever,  I  say,  thus  comprehends  what 
loyalty  to  loyalty  means,  holds  the  key  to  all 
the  familiar  mysteries  about  the  right  relation 
of  the  love  of  man  to  the  strenuous  virtues, 
and  to  the  ethics  of  conflict. 

Ill 

As  you  see,  it  is  my  deliberate  intention  to 
maintain  that  the  principle  of  loyalty  to  loyalty 
is  a  sufficient  expression  of  what  common  sense 
calls  "the  dictates  of  conscience."  When  I 
state  this  thesis,  it  leads  me,  however,  to  a 

162 


CONSCIENCE 


somewhat   new   question,  which   the   title    of 
this  lecture  is  intended  to  emphasize. 

Stated  practically,  this  our  next  question 
takes  the  form  of  asking:  Is  the  principle  of 
loyalty  to  loyalty  not  only  a  means  of  solving 
certain  perplexities,  but  an  actually  general, 
safe,  and  sufficient  test  of  what  is  right  and 
wrong  in  the  doubtful  moral  situations  which 
may  arise  in  daily  life  ?  We  have  shown  that 
the  well-recognized  duties  and  virtues,  such 
as  those  which  have  to  do  with  truth-speak- 
ing, with  courtesy,  with  fair  play  in  sport,  and 
with  chivalrous  regard  for  enemies,  can  indeed 
be  regarded,  if  we  choose,  as  special  forms  of 
loyalty  to  loyalty.  But  it  is  indeed  one 
thing  (as  you  may  now  interpose)  to  interpret 
in  terms  of  our  principle  certain  virtues  or 
duties  that  we  already  recognize.  It  is  another 
thing  to  use  the  concept  of  loyalty  to  loyalty 
as  an  universal  means  of  rinding  out  what  it  is 
right  to  do  when  one  is  otherwise  in  doubt. 
Is  our  principle  always  a  serviceable  prac- 
tical guide  ?  Or,  to  use  the  well-known  term, 
does   our  principle   adequately  express   what 

163 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

people  usually  mean  by  the  "dictates  of  con- 
science" ? 

The  word  "conscience,"  which  here  becomes 
important  for  our  philosophy  of  loyalty,  is  a 
term  of  many  uses.  The  problem  as  to  the 
true  nature  of  the  human  conscience  is  a  com- 
plicated and  difficult  one.  I  shall  here  deal 
with  the  matter  only  in  so  far  as  is  necessary 
for  our  own  distinctly  practical  purpose.  In 
expounding  my  precept,  Be  loyal  to  loyalty,  I 
have  set  forth  what  does  indeed  pretend  to  be 
a  general  guiding  maxim  for  conduct.  But 
most  of  us,  when  we  say,  "My  conscience  dic- 
tates this  or  this  sort  of  conduct,"  are  not 
disposed  to  think  of  conscience  as  definable 
in  terms  of  any  one  maxim.  Our  conscience 
seems  to  us  to  represent,  in  our  ordinary  lives, 
a  good  many  related  but  nevertheless  dis- 
tinct motives,  such  as  prudence,  charity, 
reasonableness,  piety,  and  so  on.  Conscience 
also  seems  to  us  somewhat  mysterious  in 
many  of  its  demands,  so  that  we  often  say, 
"I  do  not  precisely  know  why  this  or  this  is 
right;   but  I  feel  sure  that  it  is  right,  for  my 

164 


CONSCIENCE 

conscience  tells  me  so."  Since,  then,  con- 
science seems  so  complex  and  sometimes  so 
mysterious  a  power,  you  may  naturally  hesi- 
tate to  accept  the  views  of  a  moralist  who 
attempts,  as  you  may  think,  to  simplify  too 
much  the  requirements  of  conscience.  You 
may  still  insist  that  the  moral  doctrine  which 
I  have  so  far  set  forth  is  in  one  respect  like  all 
other  philosophies  of  conduct  that  fill  the 
history  of  ethical  thought;  because,  as  you 
may  insist,  this  theory  is  powerless  to  tell 
any  one  what  to  do  when  a  really  perplexing 
case  of  conscience  arises. 

The  reproach  that  moral  philosophers  have 
fine-sounding  principles  to  report,  but  can 
never  tell  us  how  these  principles  practically 
apply,  except  when  the  cases  are  such  as 
common  sense  has  already  decided,  — this  is 
an  old  objection  to  philosophical  ethics.  I 
want  to  show  you  how  I  myself  meet  thatf 
objection,  and  in  what  way,  and  to  what  extent, 
as  I  think,  the  principle  of  loyalty  to  loyalty 
does  express  the  true  dictates  of  conscience, 
and  does  tell  us  what  to  do  in  doubtful  cases. 

165 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

What  is  conscience  ?  You  will  all  agree 
that  the  word  names  a  mental  possession  of 
ours  which  enables  us  to  pass  some  sort  of 
judgment,  correct  or  mistaken,  upon  moral 
questions  as  they  arise.  My  conscience,  then, 
belongs  to  my  mental  equipment,  and  tells 
me  about  right  and  wrong  conduct.  More- 
over, my  conscience  approves  or  disapproves 
my  conduct,  excuses  me  or  accuses  me. 
About  the  general  nature  and  office  of  the 
conscience  we  all  of  us,  as  I  suppose,  so  far 
agree.  Our  differences  regarding  our  con- 
science begin  when  questions  arise  of  the 
following  sort :  Is  our  conscience  inborn  ? 
Is  it  acquired  by  training?  Are  its  dictates 
the  same  in  all  men  ?  Is  it  God-given  ?  Is  it 
infallible  ?  Is  it  a  separate  power  of  the  mind  ? 
Or  is  it  simply  a  name  for  a  collection  of  habits 
of  moral  judgment  which  we  have  acquired 
through  social  training,  through  reasoning, 
and  through  personal  experience  of  the  con- 
sequences of  conduct  ? 


166 


CONSCIENCE 


IV 


In  trying  to  meet^  these  questions  so  far  as 
they  here  concern  us,  it  is  important  next  to 
note  a  few  fundamental  features  which  char- 
acterize the  personal  life  of  all  of  us.  The 
first  of  these  features  appears  if  one,  instead 
of  stopping  with  the  question,  "What  is  my 
conscience?"  goes  deeper  still  and  asks  the 
question,  "Who  and  what  am  I?"  This 
latter  question  also  has  indeed  countless  as- 
pects, and  a  complete  answer  to  it  would  con- 
stitute an  entire  system  of  metaphysics.  But 
for  our  present  purpose  it  is  enough  to  note 
that  I  cannot  answer  the  question,  "Who  am 
I  ?"  except  in  terms  of  some  sort  of  statement 
of  the  plans  and  purposes  of  my  life.  In  re- 
sponding to  the  question,  "Who  are  you?" 
a  man  may  first  mention  his  name.  But  his 
name  is  a  mere  tag.  He  then  often  goes  on  to 
tell  where  he  lives,  and  where  he  comes  from. 
His  home  and  his  birthplace,  however,  are 
already  what  one  may  call  purposeful  aspects 
of  his  personality.     For  dwelling-place,  coun- 

167 


1 


* 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

try,  birthplace,  and  similar  incidental  facts 
about  a  man  tend  to  throw  light  upon  his  per- 
sonality mainly  because  they  are  of  importance 
for  a  further  knowledge  of  his  social  relations, 
and  so  of  his  social  uses  and  activities. 

But  the  answer  to  the  question,  "Who  are 
you?"  really  begins  in  earnest  when  a  man 
mentions  his  calling,  and  so  actually  sets  out 
upon  the  definition  of  his  purposes  and  of  the 
way  in  which  these  purposes  get  expressed  in 
his  life.  And  when  a  man  goes  on  to  say, 
"I  am  the  doer  of  these  and  these  deeds,  the 
friend  of  these  friends,  the  enemy  of  these 
opposing  purposes,  the  member  of  this  family, 
the  one  whose  ideals  are  such  and  such,  and 
are  so  and  so  expressed  in  my  life,"  the  man 
expresses  to  you  at  length  whatever  is  most  ex- 
pressible and  worth  knowing  in  answer  to  the 
question,  "Who  are  you  ?" 

To  sum  up,  then,  I  should  say  that  a  person, 
an  individual  self,  may  be  defined  as  a  human 
life  lived  according  to  a  plan.  If  a  man  could 
live  with  no  plan  at  all,  purposelessly  and  quite 
passively,  he  would  in  so  far  be  an  organism, 

168 


CONSCIENCE 

and  also,  if  you  choose,  he  would  be  a  psycho- 
logical specimen,  but  he  would  be  no  ^per- 
sonality.  Wherever  there  is  personality,  there 
are  purposes  worked  out  in  life.  If,  as  often 
happens,  there  are  many  purposes  connected 
with  the  life  of  this  human  creature,  many 
plans  in  this  life,  but  no  discoverable  unity  and 
coherence  of  these  plans,  then  in  so  far  there 
are  many  glimpses  of  selfhood,  many  fragmen- 
tary selves  present  in  connection  with  the  life 
of  some  human  organism.  But  there  is  so  far 
no  one  self,  no  one  person  discoverable.  You 
are  one  self  just  in  so  far  as  the  life  that  goes 
on  in  connection  with  your  organism  has  some 
one  purpose  running  through  it.  By  the  terms 
"  this  person  "  and  "  this  self,"  then,  we  mean 
this  human  life  in  so  far  as  it  expresses  some  one 
purpose.  Yet,  of  course,  this  one  purpose  which 
is  expressed  in  the  life  of  a  single  self  need  not 
be  one  which  is  defined  by  this  self  in  abstract 
terms.  On  the  contrary,  most  of  us  are  aware 
that  our  lives  are  unified,  after  a  fashion,  by 
the  very  effort  that  we  more  or  less  vaguely 
make  to  assert  ourselves  somehow  as  individ- 

169 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

uals  in  our  world.  Many  of  us  have  not  yet 
found  out  how  it  would  be  best  to  assert  our- 
selves. But  we  are  trying  to  find  out.  This 
very  effort  to  find  out  gives  already  a  certain 
unity  of  purpose  to  our  lives. 

But  in  so  far  as  we  have  indeed  found  out 
some  cause,  far  larger  than  our  individual 
selves,  to  which  we  are  fully  ready  to  be  loyal, 
this  very  cause  serves  to  give  the  required 
unity  to  our  lives,  and  so  to  determine  what 
manner  of  self  each  of  us  is,  even  though  we 
chance  to  be  unable  to  define  in  abstract  terms 
what  is  the  precise  nature  of  this  very  cause. 
Loyalty  may  be  sometimes  almost  dumb;  it 
is  so  in  many  of  those  obscure  and  humble 
models  of  loyalty  of  whom  I  have  already 
spoken.  They  express  their  loyalty  clearly 
enough  in  deeds.  They  often  could  not  very 
well  formulate  it  in  words.  They  could  not 
give  an  abstract  account  of  their  business.  Yet 
their  loyalty  gives  them  a  business.  It  unifies 
their  activities.  It  makes  of  each  of  these 
loyal  beings  an  individual  self,  —  a  life  unified 
by  a  purpose.      This  purpose  may   in   such 

170 


CONSCIENCE 

cases  come  to  consciousness  merely  as  a  willing 
hunger  to  serve  the  cause,  a  proud  obedience 
to  the  ideal  call.  But  in  any  case,  wherever 
loyalty  is,  there  is  selfhood,  personality,  indi- 
vidual purpose  embodied  in  a  life. 

And  now,  further,  if  the  argument  of  our 
first  and  second  lectures  is  right,  wherever  a  , 
human  selfhood  gets  practically  and  consciously 
unified,  there  is  some  form  of  loyalty.  For, 
except  in  terms  of  some  sort  of  loyal  purpose, 
as  we  saw,  this  mass  of  instincts,  of  passions, 
of  social  interests,  and  of  private  rebellious- 
ness, whereof  the  nature  of  any  one  of  us  is 
originally  compounded,  can  never  get  any 
effective  unity  whatever. 

To  sum  up  so  far,  —  a  self  is  a  life  in  so  far 
as  it  is  unified  by  a  single  purpose.  Our 
loyalties  furnish  such  purposes,  and  hence 
make  of  us  conscious  and  unified  moral  per- 
sons. Where  loyalty  has  not  yet  come  to  any 
sort  of  definiteness,  there  is  so  far  present  only 
a  kind  of  inarticulate  striving  to  be  an  indi- 
vidual self.  This  very  search  for  one's  true 
self  is  already  a  sort  of  life-purpose,  which,  as 

171 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

far  as  it  goes,  individuates  the  life  of  the  person 
in  question,  and  gives  him  a  task.  But  loyalty 
brings  the  individual  to  full  moral  self-con- 
sciousness. It  is  devoting  the  self  to  a  cause 
that,  after  all,  first  makes  it  a  rational  and  uni- 
fied self,  instead  of  what  the  life  of  too  many  a 
man  remains,  —  namely,  a  cauldron  of  seeth- 
ing and  bubbling  efforts  to  be  somebody,  a 
cauldron  which  boils  dry  when  life  ends. 

V 

But  what,  you  may  now  ask,  has  all  this  view 
of  the  self  to  do  with  conscience  ?  I  answer 
that  the  nature  of  conscience  can  be  under- 
stood solely  in  terms  of  such  a  theory  of  the 
self  as  the  one  just  sketched. 

Suppose  that  I  am,  in  the  foregoing  sense,  a 
more  or  less  completely  unified  and  loyal  self. 
Then  there  are  two  aspects  of  this  selfhood 
which  is  mine.  I  live  a  life ;  and  I  have,  as  a 
loyal  being,  an  ideal.  The  life  itself  is  not  the 
ideal.  They  are  and  always  remain  in  some 
sense  distinct.  For  no  one  act  offfmy  life, 
and  no  limited  set  of  acts  of  mine,  can  ever 

172 


CONSCIENCE 

completely  embody  my  ideal.  My  ideal  comes 
to  me  from  my  cause,  as  the  ideal  of  the  Speaker 
of  the  House  of  Commons,  in  the  story  that 
we  have  already  used  to  illustrate  loyalty, 
came  to  him  from  the  House.  My  cause,  how- 
ever, is  greater  than  my  individual  life.  Hence 
it  always  sets  before  me  an  ideal  which  de- 
mands more  of  me  than  I  have  yet  done, — 
more,  too,  than  I  can  ever  at  any  one  instant 
accomplish.  Even  because  of  this  vastness 
of  my  ideal,  even  because  that  to  which  I  am 
loyal  is  so  much  greater  than  I  ever  become, 
even  because  of  all  this  can  my  ideal  unify  my 
life,  and  make  a  rational  self  of  me. 

Hence,  if  I  am  indeed  one  self,  mv  one  ideal 
is  always  something  that  stands  over  against 
my  actual  life;  and  each  act  of  this  life  has 
to  be  judged,  estimated,  determined,  as  to  its 
moral  value,  in  terms  of  the  ideal.  My  cause, 
therefore,  as  it  expresses  itself  to  my  own  con- 
sciousness through  my  personal  ideal,  —  my 
cause  and  my  ideal  taken  together,  and  viewed 
as  one,  perform  the  precise  function  which  tra- 
dition has  attributed  to  conscience.     My  cause, 

173 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

then,  for  our  philosophy  of  loyalty,  is  my  con- 
science, —  my  cause  as  interpreted  through  my 
ideal  of  my  personal  life.  When  I  look  to  my 
cause,  it  furnishes  me  with  a  conscience ;  for 
it  sets  before  me  a  plan  or  ideal  of  life,  and 
then  constantly  bids  me  contrast  this  plan, 
this  ideal,  with  my  transient  and  momentary 
impulses. 

To  illustrate :  Were  I  a  loyal  judge  on  the 
bench,  whose  cause  was  my  official  function, 
then  my  judicial  conscience  would  be  simply 
my  whole  ideal  as  a  judge,  when  this  ideal  was 
contrasted  with  any  of  my  present  and  nar- 
rower views  of  the  situation  directly  before  me. 
If,  at  a  given  moment,  I  tended  to  lay  unfair 
stress  upon  one  side  of  a  controversy  that  had 
been  brought  into  my  court,  my  ideal  would 
say:  But  a  judge  is  impartial.  If  I  were  dis- 
posed to  decide  with  inadvised  haste,  the  ideal 
would  say :  But  a  judge  takes  account  of  the 
whole  law  bearing  on  the  case.  If  I  were 
offered  bribes,  my  judicial  conscience  would 
reject  them  as  being  once  for  all  ideally  intol- 
erable.    In  order  to  have  such  a  judicial  con- 

174 


CONSCIENCE 

science,  I  should,  of  course,  have  to  be  able  to 
view  my  profession  as  the  carrying  out  of  some 
one  purpose,  and  so  as  one  cause.  This  pur- 
pose I  should  have  learned,  of  course,  from  the 
traditions  of  the  office.  But  I  should  have  had 
willingly  to  adopt  these  traditions  as  my  own, 
and  to  conceive  my  own  life  in  terms  of  them, 
in  order  to  have  a  judicial  conscience  of  my 
own.  Analogous  comments  could  be  made 
upon  the  conscience  of  an  artist,  of  a  states- 
man, of  a  friend,  or  of  a  devoted  member  of  a 
family,  of  any  one  who  has  a  conscience.  To 
have  a  conscience,  then,  is  to  have  a  cause,  to 
unify  your  life  by  means  of  an  ideal  determined 
by  this  cause,  and  to  compare  the  ideal  and 
the  life. 

If  this  analysis  is  right,  your  conscience  is 
simply  that  ideal  of  life  which  constitutes  your 
moral  personality.  In  having  your  conscience 
you  become  aware  of  your  plan  of  being  your- 
self and  nobody  else.  Your  conscience  pre- 
sents to  you  this  plan,  however,  in  so  far  as  the 
plan  or  ideal  in  question  is  distinct  from  the 
life  in  which  you  are  trying  to  embody  your 

175 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

plan.  Your  life  as  it  is  lived,  your  experi- 
ences, feelings,  deeds,  —  these  are  the  embodi- 
ment of  your  ideal  plan,  in  so  far  as  your  ideal 
plan  for  your  own  individual  life  as  this  self, 
gets  embodied  at  all. 

But  no  one  act  of  yours  ever  expresses  your 
plan  of  life  perfectly.  Since  you  thus  always 
have  your  cause  beyond  you,  there  is  always 
more  to  do.  So  the  plan  or  ideal  of  life  comes 
to  stand  over  against  your  actual  life  as  a  gen- 
eral authority  by  which  each  deed  is  to  be 
tested,  just  as  the  judicial  conscience  of  the 
judge  on  the  bench  tests  each  of  his  official 
acts  by  comparing  it  with  his  personal  ideal 
of  what  a  judge  should  be.  My  conscience, 
therefore,  is  the  very  ideal  that  makes  me  this 
rational  self,  the  very  cause  that  inspires  and 
that  unifies  me.  Viewed  as  something  within 
myself,  my  conscience  is  the  spirit  of  the  self, 
first  moving  on  the  face  of  the  waters  of  natural 
desire,  and  then  gradually  creating  the  heav- 
ens and  the  earth  of  this  life  of  the  individual 
man.  This  spirit  informs  all  of  my  true  self, 
yet  is  nowhere  fully  expressed  in  any  deed. 

176 


CONSCIENCE 

So  that,  in  so  far  as  we  contrast  the  ideal  with 
the  single  deed,  we  judge  ourselves,  condemn 
ourselves,  or  approve  ourselves. 

Our  philosophy  of  loyalty  thus  furnishes  us 
with  a  theory  of  a  certain  kind  of  conscious- 
ness which,  in  any  case,  precisely  fulfils  the 
functions  of  the  traditional  conscience.  I  need 
hardly  say  that  the  conscience  which  I  have 
now  described  is  not  in  its  entirety  at  all  innate. 
On  the  contrary,  it  is  the  flower  rather  than  the 
root  of  the  moral  life.  But  unquestionably 
we  should  never  get  it  unless  we  possessed  an 
innate  power  to  become  reasonable,  unless  we 
were  socially  disposed  beings,  unless  we  were 
able  so  to  develop  our  reason  and  our  social 
powers  as  to  see  that  the  good  of  mankind  is 
indeed  also  our  own  good,  and,  in  brief,  unless 
we  inherited  a  genuine  moral  nature. 

With  this  view  of  the  nature  of  conscience,  ) 
what  can  we  say  as  to  the  infallibility  of  such 
a  conscience  ?  I  answer :  My  conscience  is  pre- 
cisely as  fallible  or  as  infallible  as  my  choice  of 
a  cause  is  subject  to  error,  or  is  of  such  nature 
as  to  lead  me  aright.     Since  loyalty,  in  so  far 

n  177 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

as  it  is  loyalty,  is  always  a  good,  the  conscience 
of  any  loyal  self  is  never  wholly  a  false  guide. 
Since  loyalty  may  be  in  many  respects  blind, 
one's  conscience  also  may  be  in  many  respects 
misleading.  On  the  other  hand,  your  con-  C 
science,  at  any  stage  of  its  development,  is 
unquestionably  the  best  moral  guide  that  you 
then  have,  simply  because,  so  far  as  it  is  viewed 
as  an  authority  outside  of  you,  it  is  your  ideal, 
your  cause,  set  before  you ;  while,  in  so  far  as 
it  is  within  you,  it  is  the  spirit  of  your  own 
self,  the  very  ideal  that  makes  you  any  rational 
moral  person  whatever.  Apart  from  it  you 
are  a  mere  pretence  of  moral  personality,  a 
manifold  fermentation  of  desires.  And  as 
you  have  only  your  own  life  to  live,  your  con- 
science alone  can  teach  you  how  to  live  that 
life.  But  your  conscience  will  doubtless  grow 
with  you,  just  as  your  loyalty  and  your  cause 
will  grow.  The  best  way  to  make  both  of  them 
grow  is  to  render  up  your  life  to  their  service 
and  to  their  expression. 

Conscience,  as  thus  defined,  is  for  each  of 
us  a  personal  affair.     In  so  far  as  many  of  us 

178 


CONSCIENCE 

are  fellow-servants  of  the  same  cause,  and, 
above  all,  in  so  far  as  all  of  us,  if  we  are  en- 
lightened, are  fellow-servants  of  the  one  cause 
of  universal  loyalty,  we  do  indeed  share  in  the 
same  conscience.  But  in  so  far  as  no  two  of 
us  can  live  the  same  life,  or  be  the  same  indi- 
vidual human  self,  it  follows  that  no  two  of  us 
can  possess  identical  consciences,  and  that  no 
two  of  us  should  wish  to  do  so.  Your  con- 
science is  not  mine;  yet  I  share  with  you 
the  same  infinite  realm  of  moral  truth,  and  we 
are  subject  to  the  same  requirement  of  loyalty 
to  loyalty.  This  requirement  must  interpret 
itself  to  us  all  in  endlessly  varied  ways.  The 
loyal  are  not  all  monotonously  doing  the  same 
thing.  Yet  they  individually  partake  of  the  one 
endlessly  varied  and  manifold  spirit  of  loyalty. 
As  to  whether  conscience  is  in  any  sense 
divine,  we  shall  learn  something  in  our  closing 
lecture  upon  the  relations  of  Loyalty  and 
Religion. 

VI 

So  far  as  is  needful  for  our  present  practical 
purpose,  the  theory  of  the  conscience  which  our 

179 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

philosophy  of  loyalty  requires  is  now  before 
you.  We  needed  this  theory  in  order  to  pre- 
pare the  way  for  answering  the  question: 
In  how  far  does  the  law,  Be  loyal  to  loyalty, 
enable  us  to  decide  cases  of  moral  doubt  ?  In 
how  far  does  this  principle  furnish  a  means 
of  discovering  these  special  precepts  about 
single  cases  which  common  sense  calls  the 
"dictates  of  conscience"? 

How  do  moral  doubts  arise  in  the  mind  of 
a  loyal  person  ?  I  answer :  Moral  doubts  arise 
in  the  loyal  mind  when  there  is  an  apparent 
conflict  between  loyalties.  As  a  fact,  that 
cause,  which  in  any  sense  unifies  a  life  as  com- 
plex as  my  human  life  is,  must  of  course  be 
no  perfectly  simple  cause.  By  virtue  of  my 
nature  and  of  my  social  training,  I  belong  to  a 
family,  to  a  community,  to  a  calling,  to  a  state, 
to  humanity.  In  order  to  be  loyal  to  loyalty, 
and  in  order  to  be  a  person  at  all,  I  must  indeed 
unify  my  loyalty.  In  the  meantime,  however, 
I  must  also  choose  special  causes  to  serve; 
and  if  these  causes  are  to  interest  me,  if  they 
are  to  engross  and  to  possess  me,  they  must  be 

180 


CONSCIENCE 

such  as  together  appeal  to  many  diverse  sides 
of  my  nature;  they  must  involve  me  in  nu- 
merous and  often  conflicting  social  tasks ;  they 
can  form  one  cause  only  in  so  far  as  they  con- 
stitute an  entire  system  of  causes.  My  loyalty 
will  be  subject,  therefore,  to  the  ancient  diffi- 
culty regarding  the  one  and  the  many.  Unless 
it  is  one  in  its  ultimate  aim,  it  will  be  no  loyalty 
to  universal  loyalty ;  unless  it  is  just  to  the  va- 
ried instincts  and  to  the  manifold  social  interests 
of  a  being  such  as  I  am,  it  cannot  engross  me. 
Despite  this  great  difficulty,  however,  the 
loyal  all  about  us  show  us  that  this  union  of 
one  and  many  in  life  is,  at  least  in  great  por- 
tions of  long  human  careers,  a  possible  thing. 
We  never  completely  win  the  union ;  we  never 
realize  to  the  full  the  one  loyal  life ;  but  in  so 
far  as  we  are  loyal,  we  win  enough  of  this  unity 
of  life  to  be  able  to  understand  the  ideal,  and 
to  make  it  our  own  guide.  Our  question  still 
remains,  however,  this:  Since  the  only  loyal 
life  that  we  can  undertake  to  live  is  so  complex, 
since  the  one  cause  of  universal  loyalty  can 
only  be  served,  by  each  of  us,  in  a  personal 

181 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

life  wherein  we  have  to  try  to  unify  various  spe- 
cial loyalties,  and  since,  in  many  cases,  these 
special  loyalties  seem  to  us  to  conflict  with  one 
another,  — how  shall  we  decide,  as  between 
two  apparently  conflicting  loyalties,  which  one 
to  follow  ?  Does  our  principle  tell  us  what  to 
do  when  loyalties  thus  seem  to  us  to  be  in  con- 
flict with  one  another  ? 

It  is,  of  course,  not  sufficient  to  answer 
here  that  loyalty  to  loyalty  requires  us  to  do 
whatever  can  be  done  to  harmonize  apparently 
conflicting  loyalties,  and  to  remove  the  con- 
flict of  loyalties  from  the  world,  and  to  utilize 
even  conflict,  where  it  is  inevitable,  so  as  to 
further  general  loyalty.  That  answer  we  have 
already  considered  in  an  earlier  passage  of  this 
discussion.  It  is  a  sound  answer;  but  it  does 
not  meet  those  cases  where  conflict  is  forced 
upon  us,  and  where  we  ourselves  must  take 
sides,  and  must  annul  or  destroy  one  or  two 
conflicting  loyalties.  One  or  two  illustrations 
of  such  a  type  will  serve  to  show  what  sorts 
of  moral  doubts  our  own  philosophy  of  loyalty 
has  especially  to  consider. 

182 


CONSCIENCE 

At  the  outset  of  our  Civil  War,  many  men  of 
the  border  states,  and  many  who  had  already 
been  in  the  service  of  the  Union,  but  who  were 
conscious  of  special  personal  duties  to  single 
states  of  the  Union,  found  themselves  in 
presence  of  a  well-known  conflict  of  loyalties. 
Consider  the  personal  problem  that  the  future 
General  Lee  had  to  solve.  Could  the  precept, 
Be  loyal  to  loyalty,  and  to  that  end,  choose  your 
own  "personal  cause  and  be  loyal  thereto,  —  could 
this  principle,  you  may  say,  have  been  of  any 
service  in  deciding  for  Lee  his  personal  problem 
at  the  critical  moment  ? 

Or  again,  to  take  a  problem  such  as  some  of 
my  own  students  have  more  than  once  urged, 
in  various  instances,  as  a  test  case  for  my 
theory  of  loyalty  to  decide :  A  young  woman, 
after  a  thorough  modern  professional  training, 
begins  a  career  which  promises  not  only  worldly 
success,  but  general  good  to  the  community  in 
which  she  works.  She  is  heartily  loyal  to  her 
profession.  It  is  a  beneficent  profession.  She 
will  probably  make  her  mark  in  that  field  if 
she  chooses  to  go  on.     Meanwhile  she  is  loyal 

183 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  LOYALTY 

to  her  own  family.  And  into  the  home,  which 
she  has  left  for  her  work,  disease,  perhaps 
death,  enters.  Her  younger  brothers  and  sis- 
ters are  now  unexpectedly  in  need  of  such  care 
as  hers ;  or  the  young  family  of  her  elder  brother 
or  sister,  through  the  death  of  their  father  or 
mother,  has  come  to  be  without  due  parental 
care.  As  elder  sister  or  as  maiden  aunt  this 
young  woman  could  henceforth  devote  herself 
to  family  tasks  that  would  mean  very  much 
for  the  little  ones  in  question.  But  this  devo- 
tion would  also  mean  years  of  complete  absorp- 
tion in  these  family  tasks,  and  would  also  mean 
an  entire  abandonment  of  the  profession  so 
hopefully  begun,  and  of  all  the  good  that  she 
can  now  be  fairlv  sure  of  doing  if  she  continues 
in  that  field. 

What  are  the  dictates  of  conscience  ?  How 
shall  this  young  woman  solve  her  problem  ? 
How  shall  she  decide  between  these  conflicting 
loyalties?  To  be  loyal  to  the  family,  to  the 
needs  of  brothers,  sisters,  nephews,  nieces,  — 
surely  this  is  indeed  devotion  of  a  self  to  a 
cause.     But  to  be  loyal  to  her  chosen  profes- 

184 


CONSCIENCE 

sion,  which,  in  this  case,  is  no  mere  hope,  but 
which  is  already  an  actual  and  successful  task, 
—  is  not  that  also  loyalty  to  a  cause  ?  And 
does  the  principle,  Be  loyal  to  loyalty,  decide 
which  of  these  two  causes  is  the  one  for  this 
young  woman  to  serve  ? 

These  two  cases  of  conscience  may  serve  as 
examples  of  the  vast  range  of  instances  of  a 
conflict  of  loyalties.  And  now  you  may  ask : 
What  will  our  principle  do  to  decide  such 
cases  ? 

VII 

I  reply  at  once  by  emphasizing  the  fact  that 
the  precept,  Be  loyal  to  loyalty,  implies  two  char- 
acteristics of  loyal  conduct  which  are,  to  my 
mind,  inseparable.  The  first  characteristic 
is  Decisiveness  on  the  part  of  the  loyal  moral 
agent.  The  second  characteristic  is  Fidelity 
to  loyal  decisions  once  made,  in  so  far  as  later 
insight  does  not  clearly  forbid  the  continuance 
of  such  fidelity.  Let  me  indicate  what  I  mean 
by  these  two  characteristics. 

Loyalty  to  loyalty  is  never  a  merely  pious 
wish.     It  is  personal  devotion.     This  devotion 

185 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  LOYALTY 

shows  itself  by  action,  not  by  mere  sentiments. 
Loyalty  to  loyalty  hence  requires  the  choice  of 
some  definite  mode  of  action.  And  this  mode 
of  action  involves,  in  critical  cases,  some  new 
choice  of  a  personal  cause,  through  which  the 
loyal  agent  undertakes  to  serve  henceforth,  as 
best  he  can,  the  general  cause  of  the  loyalty 
of  mankind.  Now,  my  special  choice  of  my 
personal  cause  is  always  fallible.  For  I  can 
never  know  with  certainty  but  that,  if  I  were 
wiser,  I  should  better  see  my  way  to  serving 
universal  loyalty  than  I  now  see  it.  Thus,  if 
I  choose  to  be  loyal  to  loyalty  by  becoming 
a  loyal  clerk  or  a  watchman  or  a  lighthouse 
keeper,  I  can  never  know  but  that,  in  some 
other  calling,  I  might  have  done  better.  Now, 
it  is  no  part  of  the  precept,  Be  loyal  to  loyalty, 
to  tell  me,  or  to  pretend  to  tell  me,  what  my 
most  effective  vocation  is.  Doubts  about  that 
topic  are  in  so  far  not  moral  doubts.  They  are 
mere  expressions  of  my  general  ignorance  of  the 
world  and  of  my  own  powers.  If  I  indeed  hap- 
pen to  know  that  I  have  no  power  to  make  a 
good  clerk  or  a  good  watchman,  the  precept 

186 


CONSCIENCE 

about  loyalty  then  tells  me  that  it  would  be  dis- 
loyal to  waste  my  powers  in  an  undertaking  for 
which  I  am  so  unfit.  If,  of  various  possible 
ways  of  undertaking  to  be  loyal  to  loyalty, 
my  present  insight  already  tells  me  that  one 
will,  in  my  case,  certainly  succeed  best  of  all, 
then,  indeed,  the  general  principle  of  loyalty 
requires  me  to  have  neither  eyes  to  see  nor 
tongue  to  speak  save  as  this  best  mode  of  ser- 
vice commands.  But  if,  at  the  critical  mo- 
ment, I  cannot  predict  which  of  two  modes  of 
serving  the  cause  of  loyalty  to  loyalty  will  lead 
to  the  more  complete  success  in  such  service, 
the  general  principle  certainly  cannot  tell  me 
which  of  these  two  modes  of  service  to  choose. 
And,  nevertheless,  the  principle  does  not 
desert  me,  even  at  the  moment  of  my  great- 
est ignorance.  It  is  still  my  guide.  For  it 
now  becomes  the  principle,  Have  a  cause; 
choose  your  cause;  be  decisive.  In  this  form 
the  principle  is  just  as  practical  as  it  would  be 
if  my  knowledge  of  the  world  and  of  my  own 
powers  were  infallible.  For  it  forbids  coward- 
ice;   it   forbids   hesitancy   beyond   the   point 

187 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

where  further  consideration  can  be  reason- 
ably expected,  for  the  present,  to  throw  new 
light  on  the  situation.  It  forbids  me  to 
play  Hamlet's  part.  It  requires  me,  in  a  loyal 
spirit  and  in  the  light  of  all  that  I  now  know, 
to  choose  and  to  proceed  to  action,  not  as  one 
who  believes  himself  omniscient,  but  as  one 
who  knows  that  the  only  way  to  be  loyal  is  to 
act  loyally,  however  ignorantly  one  has  to  act. 
Otherwise  stated,  the  case  is  this.  I  hesi- 
tate at  the  critical  moment  between  conflicting 
causes.  For  the  sake  of  loyalty  to  loyalty, 
which  one  of  two  conflicting  special  causes 
shall  I  henceforth  undertake  to  serve?  This 
is  my  question.  If  I  knew  what  is  to  be  the 
outcome,  I  could  at  once  easily  choose.  I 
am  ignorant  of  the  outcome.  In  so  far  I 
indeed  cannot  tell  which  to  choose.  But  in 
one  respect  I  am,  nevertheless,  already  com- 
mitted. I  have  already  undertaken  to  be 
loyal  to  loyalty.  In  so  far,  then,  I  already 
have  my  cause.  If  so,  however,  I  have  neither 
eyes  to  see  nor  tongue  to  speak  save  as  this 
my    highest    cause    commands.     Now,  what 

188 


CONSCIENCE 

does  this  my  highest  cause,  loyalty  to  loyalty, 
command  ?  It  commands  simply  but  im- 
peratively that,  since  I  must  serve,  and  since, 
at  this  critical  moment,  my  only  service  must 
take  the  form  of  a  choice  between  loyalties, 
I  shall  choose,  even  in  my  ignorance,  what  form 
my  service  is  henceforth  to  take.  The  point 
where  I  am  to  make  this  choice  is  determined 
by  the  obvious  fact  that,  after  a  certain  waiting 
to  find  out  whatever  I  can  find  out,  I  always 
reach  the  moment  when  further  indecision 
would  of  itself  constitute  a  sort  of  decision, — 
a  decision,  namely,  to  do  nothing,  and  so  not 
to  serve  at  all.  Such  a  decision  to  do  nothing, 
my  loyalty  to  loyalty  forbids;  and  therefore 
my  principle  clearly  says  to  me  after  a  fair 
consideration  of  the  case:  Decide,  knowingly 
if  you  can,  ignorantly  if  you  must,  but  in  any 
case  decide,  and  have  no  fear. 

The  duty  of  decisiveness  as  to  one's  loyalty 
is  thus  founded  upon  considerations  analogous 
to  those  which  Prof  essor  James  has  emphasized, 
in  speaking  of  certain  problems  about  belief 
in  his  justly  famous  essay  on  the  Will  to  Be- 

189 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

lieve.  As  soon  as  further  indecision  would 
itself  practically  amount  to  a  decision  to  do 
nothing,  —  and  so  would  mean  a  failure  to  be 
loyal  to  loyalty,  — then  at  once  decide.  This 
is  the  only  right  act.  If  you  cannot  decide 
knowingly,  put  your  own  personal  will  into  the 
matter,  and  thereupon  decide  ignorantly.  For 
ignorant  service,  which  still  knows  itself  as  a 
willing  attempt  to  serve  the  cause  of  universal 
loyalty,  is  better  than  a  knowing  refusal  to 
undertake  any  service  whatever.  The  duty  to 
decide  is,  in  such  cases,  just  that  upon  which 
our  principle  insists. 

Decision,  however,  is  meaningless  unless  it 
is  to  be  followed  up  by  persistently  active 
loyalty.  Having  surrendered  the  self  to  the 
chosen  special  cause,  loyalty,  precisely  as 
loyalty  to  loyalty,  forbids  you  to  destroy  the 
unity  of  your  own  purposes,  and  to  set  the 
model  of  disloyalty  before  your  fellows,  by 
turning  back  from  the  cause  once  chosen,  unless 
indeed  later  growth  in  knowledge  makes  mani- 
fest that  further  service  of  that  special  cause 
would  henceforth  involve  unquestionable  dis- 

190 


CONSCIENCE 

loyalty  to  universal  loyalty.  Fidelity  to  the 
cause  once  chosen  is  as  obvious  an  aspect  of  a 
thorough  devotion  of  the  self  to  the  cause  of 
universal  loyalty,  as  is  decisiveness. 

Only  a  growth  in  knowledge  which  makes  it 
evident  that  the  special  cause  once  chosen  is  an 
unworthy  cause,  disloyal  to  universal  loyalty, — 
only  such  a  growth  in  knowledge  can  absolve 
from  fidelity  to  the  cause  once  chosen.  In 
brief,  the  choice  of  a  special  personal  cause  is 
a  sort  of  ethical  marriage  to  this  cause,  with  the 
exception  that  the  duty  to  choose  some  personal 
cause  is  a  duty  for  everybody,  while  marriage 
is  not  everybody's  duty.  The  marriage  to 
your  cause  is  not  to  be  dissolved  unless  it 
becomes  unquestionably  evident  that  the  con- 
tinuance of  this  marriage  involves  positive 
unfaithfulness  to  the  cause  of  universal  loyalty. 
But  like  any  other  marriage,  the  marriage  of 
each  self  to  its  chosen  personal  cause  is  made 
in  ignorance  of  the  consequences.  Decide, 
then,  in  the  critical  case,  and,  "forsaking  all 
others,  cleave  to  your  own  cause."  Thus  only 
can  you  be  loyal  to  loyalty. 

191 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

If  you  once  view  the  matter  in  this  way,  you 
will  not  suppose  that  our  principle  would  leave 
either  the  future  General  Lee  or  our  sup- 
posed young  professional  woman  without  guid- 
ance. It  would  say:  Look  first  at  the  whole 
situation.  Consider  it  carefully.  See,  if  pos- 
sible, whether  you  can  predict  the  consequences 
to  the  general  loyalty  which  your  act  will  in- 
volve. If,  after  such  consideration,  you  still 
remain  ignorant  of  decisive  facts,  then  look  to 
your  highest  loyalty;  look  steadfastly  at  the 
cause  of  universal  loyalty  itself.  Remember 
how  the  loyal  have  always  borne  themselves. 
Then,  with  your  eyes  and  your  voice  put  as 
completely  as  may  be  at  the  service  of  that 
cause,  arouse  all  the  loyal  interests  of  your  own 
self,  just  as  they  now  are,  to  their  fullest  vigor ; 
and  hereupon  firmly  and  freely  decide.  Hence- 
forth, with  all  your  mind  and  soul  and  strength 
belong,  fearlessly  and  faithfully,  to  the  chosen 
personal  cause  until  the  issue  is  decided,  or 
until  you  positively  know  that  this  cause  can 
no  longer  be  served  without  disloyalty.  So  act, 
and  you  are  morally  right. 

192 


CONSCIENCE 

Now,  that  is  how  Lee  acted.  And  that,  too, 
is  how  all  the  loyal  of  our  own  Northern  armies 
acted.  And  to-day  we  know  how  there  was 
indeed  loyalty  to  loyalty  upon  both  sides, 
and  how  all  those  thus  loyal  actually  served 
the  one  cause  of  the  now  united  nation.  They 
loyally  shed  their  blood,  North  and  South, 
that  we  might  be  free  from  their  burden  of 
hatred  and  of  horror.  Precisely  so  should  the 
young  woman  of  our  ideal  instance  choose. 
It  is  utterly  vain  for  another  to  tell  her  which 
she  ought  to  choose,  —  her  profession  or  her 
family.  But  it  would  be  equally  vain,  and  an 
insult  to  loyalty,  lightly  to  say  to  her :  Do  as 
you  please.  One  can  say  to  her:  Either  of 
these  lives,  —  the  life  of  the  successful  servant 
of  a  profession,  or  the  life  of  the  devoted  sister 
or  aunt,  —  either,  if  loyally  lived,  is  indeed  a 
whole  life.  Nobody  ought  to  ask  for  a  more 
blessed  lot  than  is  either  of  these  lives, —  how- 
ever obscure  the  household  drudgery  of  the 
one  may  be,  however  hard  beset  by  cares  the 
worldly  success  of  the  other  may  prove,  or 
however  toilsome  either  of  them  in  prospect  is, 

o  193 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

so  long  as  either  is  faithfully  lived  out  in 
full  devotion.  For  nobody  has  anything  better 
than  loyalty,  or  can  get  anything  better.  But 
one  of  them  alone  can  you  live.  No  mortal 
knows  which  is  the  better  for  your  world. 
With  all  your  heart,  in  the  name  of  universal 
loyalty,  choose.  And  then  be  faithful  to  the 
choice.  So  shall  it  be  morally  well  with 
you. 

Now,  if  this  view  of  the  application  of  our 
precept  is  right,  you  see  how  our  principle  is 
just  to  that  mysterious  and  personal  aspect  of 
conscience  upon  which  common  sense  insists. 

Such  a  loval  choice  as  I  have  described  de- 

«/ 

mands,  of  course,  one's  will,  —  one's  conscious 
decisiveness.  It  also  calls  out  all  of  one's 
personal  and  more  or  less  unconsciously  pres- 
ent instincts,  interests,  affections,  one's  socially 
formed  habits,  and  whatever  else  is  woven  into 
the  unity  of  each  individual  self.  Loyalty, 
as  we  have  all  along  seen,  is  a  willing  devotion. 
Since  it  is  willing,  it  involves  conscious  choice. 
Since  it  is  devotion,  it  involves  all  the  mystery 
of  finding  out  that  some  cause  awakens  us, 

194 


CONSCIENCE 

fascinates  us,  reverberates  through  our  whole 
being,  possesses  us.  It  is  a  fact  that  critical 
decisions  as  to  the  direction  of  our  loyalty 
can  be  determined  by  our  own  choice.  It  is 
also  a  fact  that  loyalty  involves  more  than  mere 
conscious  choice.  It  involves  that  response  of 
our  entire  nature,  conscious  and  unconscious, 
which  makes  loyalty  so  precious.  Now,  this 
response  of  the  whole  nature  of  the  self,  when 
the  result  is  a  moral  decision,  is  what  common 
sense  has  in  mind  when  it  views  our  moral  de- 
cisions as  due  to  our  conscience,  but  $ur  con- 
science as  a  mysterious  higher  or  deeper  self. 
As  a  fact,  the  conscience  is  the  ideal  of  the 
self,  coming  to  consciousness  as  a  present  com- 
mand. It  says,  Be  loyal.  If  one  asks,  Loyal 
to  what?  tne  conscience,  awakened  by  our 
whole  personal  response  to  the  need  of  man- 
kind replies,  Be  loyal  to  loyalty.  If,  hereupon, 
various  loyalties  seem  to  conflict,  the  conscience 
says:  Decide.  If  one  asks,  How  decide? 
conscience  further  urges,  Decide  as  I,  your 
conscience,  the  ideal  expression  of  your  whole 
personal   nature,    conscious    and   unconscious, 

195 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

find  best.  If  one  persists,  But  you  and  I  may 
be  wrong,  the  last  word  of  conscience  is, 
We  are  fallible,  but  we  can  be  decisive  and  faith- 
ful ;  and  this  is  loyalty. 


106 


SOME  AMERICAN  PROBLEMS   IN   THEIR 
RELATION   TO   LOYALTY 


LECTURE  V 

SOME    AMERICAN    PROBLEMS    IN    THEIR 
RELATION   TO   LOYALTY 

IN  the  philosophy  of  loyalty,  whose  general 
statement  has  been  contained  in  the  fore- 
going lectures,  I  have  made  an  effort  to  recon- 
cile the  conception  of  loyalty  with  that  of  a 
rational  and  moral  individualism.  To  every 
ethical  individualist  I  have  said :  In  loyalty 
alone  is  the  fulfilment  of  the  reasonable  pur- 
poses of  your  individualism.  If  you  want 
true  freedom,  seek  it  in  loyalty.  If  you  want 
self-expression,  spirituality,  moral  autonomy, 
loyalty  alone  can  give  you  these  goods.  But 
equally  I  have  insisted  upon  interpreting  loyalty 
in  terms  that  emphasize  the  significance  of  the 
individual  choice  of  that  personal  cause  to 
which  one  is  to  be  loyal.  This  evening,  as 
I  approach  the  application  of  our  philosophy 
of  loyalty  to  some  well-known  American  prob- 

199 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

lems,  it  is  important  for  us  to  bear  in  mind 
from  the  outset  this  synthesis  of  individualism 
and  loyalty  which  constitutes  our  whole  ethical 
doctrine. 

I 

The  traditional  view  of  loyalty  has  associated 
the  term,  in  the  minds  of  most  of  you,  with 
moral  situations  in  which  some  external  social 
power  predetermines  for  the  individual,  with- 
out his  consent,  all  the  causes  to  which  he 
ought  to  be  loyal.  Loyalty  so  conceived  ap- 
pears to  be  opposed  to  individual  liberty. 
But  in  our  philosophy  of  loyalty  there  is  only 
one  cause  which  is  rationally  and  absolutely 
determined  for  the  individual  as  the  right  cause 
for  him  as  for  everybody,  —  this  is  the  general 
cause  defined  by  the  phrase  loyalty  to  loyalty. 
The  way  in  which  any  one  man  is  to  show  his 
loyalty  to  loyalty  is,  however,  in  our  phi- 
losophy of  loyalty,  something  which  varies  end- 
lessly with  the  individual,  and  which  can  never 
be  precisely  defined  except  by  and  through  his 
personal  consent.  I  can  be  loyal  to  loyalty 
only  in  my  own  fashion,  and  by  serving  my 

200 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

own  special  personal  system  of  causes.  How 
wide  a  range  of  moral  freedom  of  conscience 
this  fact  gives  me,  we  began  at  the  last  time 
to  see.  In  order  to  make  that  fact  still  clearer, 
let  me  sum  up  our  moral  code  afresh,  and  in 
another  order  than  the  one  used  at  the  last 
time. 

As  our  philosophy  of  loyalty  states  the  case, 
the  moral  law  is:  (1)  be  loyal;  (2)  to  that 
end  have  a  special  cause  or  a  system  of 
causes  which  shall  constitute  your  personal 
object  of  loyalty,  your  business  in  life;  (3) 
choose  this  cause,  in  the  first  place,  for  your- 
self, but  decisively,  and  so  far  as  the  general 
principle  of  loyalty  permits,  remain  faithful 
to  this  chosen  cause,  until  the  work  that  you 
can  do  for  it  is  done;  and  (4)  the  general 
principle  of  loyalty  to  which  all  special  choices 
of  one's  cause  are  subject,  is  the  principle: 
Be  loyal  to  loyalty,  that  is,  do  what  you  can 
to  produce  a  maximum  of  the  devoted  ser- 
vice of  causes,  a  maximum  of  fidelity,  and  of 
selves  that  choose  and  serve  fitting  objects  of 
loyalty. 

201 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

From  the  point  of  view  of  this  statement  of 
the  moral  law,  we  are  all  in  the  wrong  in  case 
we  have  no  cause  whatever  to  which  we  are 
loyal.  If  you  are  an  individualist  in  the  sense 
that  you  are  loyal  to  nothing,  you  are  certainly 
false  to  your  duty.  Furthermore,  in  order 
that  you  should  be  loyal  at  all,  the  cause  to 
which  you  are  loyal  must  involve  the  union  of 
various  persons  by  means  of  some  social  tie, 
which  has  in  some  respects  an  impersonal  or 
superindividual  character,  as  well  as  a  distinct 
personal  interest  for  each  of  the  persons  con- 
cerned. 

On  the  other  hand,  my  statement  of  the 
moral  principle  gives  to  us  all  an  extremely 
limited  right  to  judge  what  the  causes  are  to 
which  any  one  of  our  neighbors  ought  to  devote 
himself.  Having  defined  loyalty  as  I  have 
done  as  a  devotion  to  a  cause,  outside  the  pri- 
vate self,  and  yet  chosen  by  this  individual 
self  as  his  cause;  having  pointed  out  the 
general  nature  which  such  a  cause  must  possess 
in  order  to  be  worthy, — namely,  having  shown 
that  it  must  involve  the  mentioned  union  of 

202 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

personal  and  impersonal  interests;  having, 
furthermore,  asserted  that  all  rightly  chosen 
loyalty  is  guided  by  the  intent  not  to  enter  into 
any  unnecessary  destruction  of  the  loyalty  of 
others,  but  is  inspired  by  loyalty  to  loyalty, 
and  so  seeks,  as  best  the  loyal  individual  can, 
to  further  loyalty  as  a  common  good  for  all 
mankind, — having  said  so  much,  I  must,  from 
my  point  of  view,  leave  to  the  individual  the 
decision  as  to  the  choice  of  the  cause  or  causes 
to  which  he  is  loyal,  subject  only  to  these 
mentioned  conditions.  I  have  very  little  right 
to  judge,  except  by  the  most  unmistakable 
expression  of  my  fellow's  purpose,  whether  he 
is  actually  loyal,  in  the  sense  of  my  definition, 
or  not. 

I  may  say  of  a  given  person  that  I  do  not 
understand  to  what  cause  he  is  loyal.  But  I 
can  assert  that  he  is  disloyal  only  when  I  know 
what  cause  it  is  to  which  he  has  committed 
himself,  and  what  it  is  that  he  has  done  to  be 
false  to  his  chosen  fidelity.  Or  again,  I  can 
judge  that  he  lacks  loyalty  if  he  makes  it  per- 
fectly evident  by  his  acts  or  by  his  own  con- 

203 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

fessions  that  he  has  chosen  no  cause  at  all. 
If  he  is  unquestionably  loyal  to  something,  to 
his  country  or  to  his  profession  or  to  his 
family,  I  may  criticise  his  expression  of  loyalty, 
in  so  far  as  I  clearly  see  that  it  involves  him  in 
unnecessary  assault  upon  the  loyalty  of  others, 
or  upon  their  means  to  be  loyal.  Thus,  all 
unnecessary  personal  aggression  upon  what  we 
commonly  call  the  rights  of  other  individuals 
are  excluded  by  my  formula,  simply  because 
in  case  I  deprive  my  fellow  of  his  property, 
his  life,  or  his  physical  integrity,  I  take  away 
from  him  the  only  means  whereby  he  can  ex- 
press in  a  practical  way  whatever  loyalty  he 
has.  Hence  such  aggression,  unless  necessary, 
involves  disloyalty  to  the  general  loyalty  of 
mankind,  is  a  crime  against  humanity  at  large, 
and  is  inconsistent  with  any  form  of  loyalty. 
Such  is  the  range  of  judgment  that  we  have  a 
right  to  use  in  our  moral  estimates  of  other 
people.  The  range  thus  indicated  is,  as  I 
have  insisted,  large  enough  to  enable  us  to 
define  all  rationally  defensible  special  prin- 
ciples regarding  right  and  wrong  acts.     Mur- 

204 


SOME  AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

der,  lying,  evil  speaking,  unkindness,  are 
from  this  point  of  view  simply  forms  of  dis- 
loyalty. 

But  my  right  to  judge  the  choices  of  my 
fellow  is  thus  very  sharply  limited.  I  cannot 
say  that  he  is  disloyal  because  his  personal 
cause  is  not  my  cause,  or  because  I  have  no 
sympathy  with  the  objects  to  which  he  devotes 
himself.  I  have  no  right  to  call  him  disloyal 
because  I  should  find  that  if  I  were  to  do  what 
he  does,  I  should  indeed  be  disloyal  to  causes 
that  I  accept.  I  may  not  judge  a  man  to  be 
without  an  object  of  loyalty  merely  because 
I  do  not  understand  what  the  object  is  with 
which  he  busies  himself.  I  may  regard  his 
cause  as  too  narrow,  if  I  clearly  see  that  he 
could  do  better  service  than  he  does  to  the 
cause  of  universal  loyalty.  But  when  I  ob- 
serve how  much  even  the  plainest  and  humblest 
of  the  loyal  sometimes  unconsciously  do  to  help 
others  to  profit  by  the  contagion  of  their  own 
loyalty,  by  the  example  of  their  faithfulness, 
I  must  be  cautious  about  judging  another 
man's  cause  to  be  too  narrow.     You  cannot 

205 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  LOYALTY 

easily  set  limits  to  the  occupations  that  the  sin- 
cere choice  of  somebody  will  make  expressions 
of  genuine  loyalty.  The  loyal  individual  may 
live  largely  alone;  or  mainly  in  company.  His 
life  may  be  spent  in  the  office  or  in  the  study 
or  in  the  workshop  or  in  the  field;  in  arctic 
exploration,  in  philanthropy,  in  a  laboratory. 
And  yet  the  true  form  and  spirit  of  loyalty, 
and  of  loyalty  to  loyalty,  when  once  you  get 
an  actual  understanding  of  the  purposes  of  the 
self  that  is  in  question,  is  universal  and  un- 
mistakable. 

I  hesitate,  therefore,  to  decide  for  another 
person  even  such  a  question  as  the  way  in  which 
his  most  natural  and  obvious  opportunities 
for  loyalty  shall  be  used.  It  is  true  that  nature 
furnishes  to  us  all  opportunities  for  loyalty 
which  it  seems  absurd  to  neglect.  Charity, 
as  they  say,  begins  at  home.  Still  more  obvi- 
ously does  loyalty  naturally  begin  at  home. 
People  who  wholly  neglect  their  natural  family 
ties  often  thereby  make  probable  that  they  are 
disloyal  people.  Yet  the  well-known  word 
about  hating  father  and  mother  in  the  service 

206 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

of  a  universal  cause  paradoxically  states  a 
possibility  to  which  the  history  of  the  early 
Christian  martyrs  more  than  once  gave  an 
actual  embodiment.  If  the  martyr  might 
break  loose  from  all  family  ties  in  his  loyal  ser- 
vice of  his  faith,  one  cannot  attempt  to  deter- 
mine for  another  person  at  just  what  point  the 
neglect  of  a  naturally  present  opportunity  for 
loyalty  becomes  an  inevitable  incident  of  the 
choice  of  loyalty  that  one  has  made.  Nature, 
after  all,  furnishes  us  merely  our  opportuni- 
ties to  be  loyal.  Some  of  these  must  be  used. 
None  of  them  may  be  so  ignored  that  thereby 
we  deliberately  increase  the  disloyalty  of 
mankind.  But  the  individual  retains  the 
inalienable  duty,  which  nobody,  not  even  his 
most  pious  critical  neighbor,  can  either  perform 
or  wholly  judge  for  him,  —  the  duty  to  decide 
wherein  his  own  loyalty  lies.  Yet  the  duty  to 
be  loyal  to  loyalty  is  absolutely  universal  and 
rigid. 

As  we  also  saw  at  the  last  time,  since  fidelity 
and  loyalty  are  indeed  inseparable,  the  break- 
ing of  the  once  plighted  faith  is  always  a  dis- 

207 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

loyal  act,  unless  the  discovery  that  the  original 
undertaking  involves  one  in  disloyalty  to  the 
general  cause  of  loyalty  requires  the  change. 
Thus,  indeed,  the  once  awakened  and  so  far 
loyal  member  of  the  robber  band  would  be 
bound  by  his  newly  discovered  loyalty  to  hu- 
manity in  general,  to  break  his  oath  to  the 
band.  But  even  in  such  a  case,  he  would  still 
owe  to  his  comrades  of  the  former  service  a 
kind  of  fidelity  which  he  would  not  have  owed 
had  he  never  been  a  member  of  the  band.  His 
duty  to  his  former  comrades  would  change 
through  his  new  insight.  But  he  could  never 
ignore  his  former  loyalty,  and  would  never  be 
absolved  from  the  peculiar  obligation  to  his 
former  comrades, — the  obligation  to  help  them 
all  to  a  higher  service  of  humanity  than  they 
had  so  far  attained. 

You  see,  from  this  point  of  view,  how  the 
requirements  of  the  spirit  of  loyalty  are  in  one 
sense  perfectly  stern  and  unyielding,  while 
in  another  sense  they  are  and  must  be  capable 
of  great  freedom  of  interpretation.  In  judg- 
ing myself,  in  deciding  how  I  can  best  be  loyal 

208 


SOME  AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

to  loyalty,  in  deciding  what  special  causes  they 
are  through  which  I  am  to  express  my  loyalty, 
in  judging  whether  my  act  is  justified  by  my 
loyalty,  —  in  all  these  respects  I  must  be  with 
myself,  at  least  in  principle,  entirely  rigid.  As 
I  grow  in  knowledge,  I  shall  better  learn  how 
to  be  loyal.  I  shall  learn  to  serve  new  causes, 
to  recover  from  vain  attempts  at  a  service  of 
which  I  was  incapable,  and  in  general  to  be- 
come a  better  servant  of  the  cause.  But  at 
each  point  of  my  choice  my  obligation  to  be 
loyal,  to  have  a  cause,  to  have  for  the  purposes 
of  voluntary  conduct  no  eyes  and  ears  and  voice 
save  as  this  cause  directs,  —  this  obligation  is 
absolute.  I  cannot  excuse  myself  from  it  with- 
out being  false  to  my  own  purpose.  I  may 
sleep  or  be  slothful,  but  precisely  in  so  far  as 
such  relaxation  fits  me  for  work.  I  may 
amuse  myself,  but  because  amusement  is 
again  a  necessary  preliminary  to  or  accompani- 
ment of  loyal  service.  I  may  seek  my  private 
advantage,  but  only  in  so  far  as,  since  I  am  an 
instrument  of  my  cause,  it  is  indeed  my  duty, 
and  is  consistent  with  my  loyalty,  to  furnish  to 
p  209 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

the  cause  an  effective  instrument.  But  the 
general  principle  remains :  Working  or  idle, 
asleep  or  awake,  joyous  or  sorrowful,  thoughtful 
or  apparently  careless,  at  critical  moments,  or 
when  engaged  in  the  most  mechanical  routine, 
in  so  far  as  my  will  can  determine  what  I  am, 
I  must  be  whatever  my  loyalty  requires  me  to 
be.  And  in  so  far  my  voluntary  life  is  from 
my  point  of  view  a  topic  for  judgments  which 
are  in  principle  perfectly  determinate. 

Profoundly  different  must  be  my  judgment 
in  case  of  my  estimate  of  the  loyalty  of  my 
fellow.  The  tasks  of  mankind  are  not  only 
common  but  also  individual.  So  long  as  you 
are  sure  of  your  own  loyalty,  and  do  not  break 
your  trust,  I  cannot  judge  that  you  are  actually 
disloyal.  I  can  only  judge  in  some  respects 
whether  your  loyalty  is  or  is  not  enlightened, 
is  or  is  not  successful,  is  or  is  not  in  unneces- 
sary conflict  with  the  loyalty  of  others.  I  have 
to  be  extremely  wary  of  deciding  what  the 
loyalty  of  others  demands  of  them.  But  this 
I  certainly  know,  that  if  a  man  has  made  no 
choice  for  himself  of  the  cause  that  he  serves, 

210 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

he  is  not  yet  come  to  his  rational  self,  he  has 
not  yet  found  his  business  as  a  moral  agent. 

II 

Such  are  our  general  results  regarding  the 
nature  of  loyalty  as  an  ethical  principle.  This 
complete  synthesis  of  loyalty  with  a  rational 
individualism  must  be  borne  in  mind  as 
we  attempt  a  certain  practical  application  of 
these  principles  to  the  problem  of  our  present 
American  life.  If  there  is  any  truth  in  the 
foregoing,  then  our  concept  especially  helps 
us  in  trying  to  define  what  it  is  that  we  most 
need  in  the  social  life  of  a  democracy,  and  what 
means  we  have  of  doing  something  to  satisfy 
the  moral  needs  of  our  American  community, 
while  leaving  the  liberties  of  the  people  intact. 

Liberty  without  loyalty  —  of  what  worth,  if 
the  foregoing  principles  are  sound,  could  such 
liberty  be  to  any  people  ?  And  yet,  if  you 
recall  the  protest  of  my  young  friend,  the  Rus- 
sian immigrant's  son,  as  cited  to  you  in  a  for- 
mer lecture,  you  will  be  reminded  of  the  great 
task  that  now  lies  before  our  American  people, 

211 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

—  the  task  of  teaching  millions  of  foreign  birth 
and  descent  to  understand  and  to  bear  con- 
stantly in  mind  the  value  of  loyalty,  the 
task  also  of  keeping  our  own  loyalty  intact 
in  the  presence  of  those  enormous  complica- 
tions of  social  life  which  the  vastness  of  our 
country,  and  the  numbers  of  our  foreign  immi- 
grants are  constantly  increasing.  The  prob- 
lem here  in  question  is  not  merely  the  problem 
of  giving  instruction  in  the  duties  of  citizenship 
to  those  to  whom  our  country  is  new,  nor  yet  of 
awakening  and  preserving  patriotism.  It  is  the 
problem  of  keeping  alive  what  we  now  know 
to  be  the  central  principle  of  the  moral  life  in 
a  population  which  is  constantly  being  altered 
by  new  arrivals,  and  unsettled  by  great  social 
changes. 

If  you  recall  what  was  said  in  our  former 
lecture  regarding  modern  individualism  in 
general,  you  will  also  see  that  our  American 
immigration  problem  is  only  one  aspect  of  a 
world-wide  need  of  moral  enlightenment,  — ■ 
a  need  characteristic  of  our  time.  One  is 
tempted  to  adapt  Lincoln's  great  words,  and 

212 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

to  say  that  in  all  nations,  but  particularly  in 
America,  we  need  in  this  day  to  work  together 
to  the  end  that  loyalty  of  the  people,  by  the 
people,  and  for  the  people  shall  not  perish  from 
the  earth. 

It  is  not,  indeed,  that  loyal  people  no  longer 
are  frequent  amongst  us.  The  faithful  who 
live  and  die  in  loyalty  so  far  as  they  know 
loyalty  are  indeed  not  yet  uncommon.  The 
loyalty  of  the  common  people  is  precisely  the 
most  precious  moral  treasure  of  our  world. 
But  the  moral  dangers  of  our  American  civil- 
ization are  twofold.  First,  loyalty  is  not  suf- 
ficiently prominent  amongst  our  explicit  social 
ideals  in  America.  It  is  too  much  left  to  the 
true-hearted  obscure  people.  It  is  not  suffi- 
ciently emphasized.  Our  popular  literature 
too  often  ignores  it  or  misrepresents  it.  This 
is  one  danger,  since  it  means  that  loyalty  is  too 
often  discouraged  and  confused,  instead  of 
glorified  and  honored.  In  the  long  run,  if  not 
checked,  this  tendency  must  lead  to  a  great 
decrease  of  loyalty.  The  second  danger  lies  in 
the  fact  that  when  loyalty  is  indeed  emphasized 

213 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

and  glorified,  it  is  then  far  too  seldom  conceived 
as  rationally  involving  loyalty  to  universal  loy- 
alty. Hence  we  all  think  too  often  of  loyalty 
as  a  warlike  and  intolerant  virtue,  and  not  as 
the  spirit  of  universal  peace.  Enlightened  loy- 
alty, as  we  have  now  learned,  means  harm  to  no 
man's  loyalty.  It  is  at  war  only  with  disloy- 
alty, and  its  warfare,  unless  necessity  con- 
strains, is  only  a  spiritual  warfare.  It  does 
not  foster  class  hatreds ;  it  knows  of  nothing 
reasonable  about  race  prejudices,  and  it  regards 
all  races  of  men  as  one  in  their  need  of  loyalty. 
It  ignores  mutual  misunderstandings.  It  loves 
its  own  wherever  upon  earth  its  own,  namely, 
loyalty  itself,  is  to  be  found.  Enlightened  loy- 
alty takes  no  delight  in  great  armies  or  in  great 
navies  for  their  own  sake.  If  it  consents  to 
them,  it  views  them  merely  as  transiently  nec- 
essary calamities.  It  has  no  joy  in  national 
prowess,  except  in  so  far  as  that  prowess  means 
a  furtherance  of  universal  loyalty.  And  it  re- 
gards the  war-spirit,  which  in  our  first  lecture 
we  used  as  an  example  of  loyalty, — it  regards 
this  spirit,  I  say,  as  at  its  best  an  outcome  of 

214 


SOME   AMERICAN    PROBLEMS 

necessity  or  else  of  unenlightened  loyalty,  and 
as  at  its  worst  one  of  the  basest  of  disloyalties 
to  universal  loyalty. 

Now,  it  is  precisely  this  enlightened  form  of 
loyalty,  this  conception  of  loyalty  to  loyalty, 
which  we  most  need  to  have  taught  to  our 
American  people,  —  taught  openly,  explicitly, 
—  yet  not  taught,  for  the  most  part,  by  the 
now  too  familiar  method  of  fascinating  denun- 
ciations of  the  wicked,  nor  by  the  mere  display 
of  force,  social  or  political,  nor  by  the  setting 
of  class  against  class,  nor  yet  by  any  glorifica- 
tion of  mere  power,  nor  by  appeals  merely  to 
patriotic  but  confused  fervor.  We  want  loyalty 
to  loyalty  taught  by  helping  many  people  to  be 
loyal  to  their  own  special  causes,  and  by  show- 
ing them  that  loyalty  is  a  precious  common 
human  good,  and  that  it  can  never  be  a  good 
to  harm  any  man's  loyalty  except  solely  in 
necessary  defence  of  our  own  loyalty. 

Ill 

From  the  point  of  view  of  the  foregoing  dis- 
cussion, if  you  want  to  do  the  best  you  can  to 

215 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  LOYALTY 

teach  loyalty,  not  now  to  single  individuals,  but 
to  great  masses  of  people,  —  masses  such  as  our 
whole  nation,  —  you  should  do  three  things: 
(1)  You  should  aid  them  to  possess  and  to  keep 
those  physical  and  mental  powers  and  posses- 
sions which  are  the  necessary  conditions  for 
the  exercise  of  loyalty.  (2)  You  should  pro- 
vide them  with  manifold  opportunities  to  be 
loyal,  that  is,  with  a  maximum  of  significant, 
rational  enterprises,  such  as  can  be  loyally 
carried  out;  you  should,  if  possible,  secure 
for  them  a  minimum  of  the  conditions  that 
lead  to  the  conflicts  of  various  forms  of  loyalty ; 
and  you  should  furnish  them  a  variety  of  oppor- 
tunities to  get  social  experience  of  the  value  of 
loyalty.  (3)  You  should  explicitly  show  them 
that  loyalty  is  the  best  of  human  goods,  and 
that  loyalty  to  loyalty  is  the  crown  and  the  real 
meaning  of  all  loyalty. 

Helping  the  people  to  the  attainment  and 
preservation  of  their  powers  obviously  involves 
the  sort  of  care  of  public  health,  the  sort  of 
general  training  of  intelligence,  the  sort  of 
protection  and  assistance,  which  our  philan- 

216 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

thropists  and  teachers  and  public-spirited  peo- 
ple generally  regard  as  important.  There  is 
no  doubt  that  in  our  modern  American  life  our 
social  order  does  give  to  great  numbers  of 
people  care  and  assistance  and  protection, 
such  as  earlier  stages  of  civilization  lacked. 
But  the  other  side  of  the  task  of  providing 
our  people  with  the  means  of  ethical  advance- 
ment, the  side  that  has  to  do  with  letting  them 
know  what  loyalty  is,  and  with  giving  them 
opportunities  to  be  loyal,  this  side,  I  say,  of 
what  we  ought  to  do  to  further  the  moral  prog- 
ress of  our  people,  is  at  present  very  imper- 
fectly accomplished. 

With  prosperity,  as  we  may  well  admit,  sym- 
pathy, benevolence,  public  spirit,  even  the 
more  rational  philanthropy  which  seeks  not 
merely  to  relieve  suffering,  but  to  improve  the 
effective  powers  of  those  whom  we  try  to  help, 
—  all  these  things  have  become,  in  recent 
decades,  more  and  more  prominent  on  the 
better  side  of  our  civilization.  And  yet  I 
insist,  just  as  prosperity  is  not  virtue,  and  just 
as  power  is  not  morality,  so  too  even  public 

217 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

charity,  and  even  the  disposition  to  train  peo- 
ple, to  make  them  more  intelligent,  to  give 
them  new  power,  all  such  dispositions  are  in- 
sufficient to  insure  the  right  moral  training  of 
our  people,  or  the  effective  furtherance  of  ideal 
life  amongst  them. 

What  men  need  involves  opportunity  for 
loyalty.  And  such  opportunity  they  get,  espe- 
cially through  the  suggestion  of  objects  to 
which  they  can  be  loyal.  If  you  want  to  train 
a  man  to  a  good  life,  you  must  indeed  do  what 
you  can  to  give  him  health  and  power.  And 
you  do  something  for  him  when,  by  example 
and  by  precept,  you  encourage  him  to  be  sym- 
pathetic, public-spirited,  amiable,  or  industri- 
ous. But  benevolence,  sympathy,  what  some 
people  love  to  call  altruism,  — these  are  all  mere 
fragments  of  goodness,  mere  aspects  of  the 
dutiful  life.  What  is  needed  is  loyalty.  Mean- 
while, since  loyalty  is  so  plastic  a  virtue,  since 
the  choice  of  the  objects  of  loyalty  must  vary  so 
widely  from  individual  to  individual,  and  since, 
above  all,  you  can  never  force  anybody  to  be 
loyal,  but  can  only  show  him  opportunities 

218 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

for  loyalty,  and  teach  him  by  example  and  pre- 
cept what  loyalty  is,  the  great  need  of  any 
higher  civilization  is  a  vast  variety  of  oppor- 
tunities for  individual  loyalty,  and  of  sugges- 
tion regarding  what  forms  of  loyalty  are  possi- 
ble. 

Now,  I  need  not  for  a  moment  ignore  the 
fact  that  every  higher  civilization,  and  of  course 
our  own,  presents  to  any  intelligent  person  nu- 
merous opportunities  to  be  loyal.  But  what 
I  must  point  out  in  our  present  American  life  is, 
that  our  opportunities  for  loyalty  are  not 
rightly  brought  to  our  consciousness  by  the 
conditions  of  our  civilization,  so  that  a  great 
mass  of  our  people  are  far  too  little  reminded 
of  what  chances  for  loyalty  they  themselves 
have,  or  of  what  loyalty  is.  Meanwhile  our 
national  prosperity  and  our  national  greatness 
involve  us  all  in  many  new  temptations  to 
disloyalty,  and  distract  our  minds  too  much 
from  dwelling  upon  the  loyal  side  of  life;  so 
that  at  the  very  moment  when  our  philanthropy 
is  growing,  when  our  sympathies  are  con- 
stantly aroused  through  the  press,  the  drama, 

219 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

and  our  sensitive  social  life  generally,  our 
training  in  loyalty  is  falling  away.  Our  young 
people  grow  up  with  a  great  deal  of  their 
attention  fixed  upon  personal  success,  and  also 
with  a  great  deal  of  training  in  sympathetic 
sentiments;  but  they  get  far  too  little  knowl- 
edge, either  practical  or  theoretical,  of  what 
loyalty  means. 

IV 

The  first  natural  opportunity  for  loyalty  is 
furnished  by  family  ties.  We  all  know  how 
some  of  the  conditions  of  our  civilization  tend 
with  great  masses  of  our  population  to  a  new 
interpretation  of  family  ties  in  which  family 
loyalty  often  plays  a  much  less  part  than  it 
formerly  did  in  family  life.  Since  our  mod- 
ern family  is  less  patriarchal  than  it  used  to  be, 
our  children,  trained  in  an  individualistic 
spirit,  frequently  make  little  of  certain  duties 
to  their  parents  which  the  ancient  family  re- 
garded as  imperative  and  exalted  as  ideal. 
Many  of  us  deliberately  prefer  the  loss  of  cer- 
tain results  of  the  patriarchal  family  tie,  and 

220 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

are  glad  that  in  the  modern  American  family 
the  parental  decisions  regarding  the  marriage 
choices  of  children  are  so  much  less  decisive 
than  they  used  to  be.  Many  insist  that  other 
weakenings  of  the  family  tie,  such  as  divorce 
legislation  and  the  practice  of  divorce  have 
involved,  are  in  the  direction  of  a  reasonable 
recognition  of  individual  interests. 

I  will  not  try  to  discuss  these  matters  at 
length.  But  this  I  can  say  without  hesitation  : 
The  family  ties,  so  far  as  they  are  natural, 
are  opportunities  for  loyalty;  so  far  as  they 
are  deliberately  chosen  or  recognized,  are  in- 
stances of  the  choice  of  a  loyalty.  From  our 
point  of  view,  therefore,  they  must  be  judged  as 
all  other  opportunities  and  forms  of  loyalty  are 
judged.  That  such  opportunities  and  forms 
alter  their  character  as  civilization  changes  is 
inevitable,  and  need  be  no  matter  for  super- 
stitious cares  regarding  whatever  was  arbitrary 
in  traditional  views  of  family  authority.  But, 
after  all,  fidelity  and  family  devotion  are 
amongst  the  most  precious  opportunities  and 
instances  of  loyalty.     Faithlessness  can  never 

221 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

become  a  virtue,  however  your  traditions  about 
the  forms  of  faithfulness  may  vary  in  their 
external  details.  Whoever  deliberately  breaks 
the  tie  to  which  he  is  devoted  loses  the  oppor- 
tunity and  the  position  of  the  loyal  self,  and  in 
so  far  loses  the  best  sort  of  thing  that  there  is  in 
the  moral  world.  No  fondness  for  individual- 
ism will  ever  do  away  with  this  fact.  We  want 
more  individuals  and  more  rational  individ- 
ualism ;  but  the  only  possible  ethical  use  of  an 
individual  is  to  be  loyal.  He  has  no  other 
destiny. 

When  a  man  feels  his  present  ties  to  be 
arbitrary  or  to  be  a  mechanical  bondage,  he 
sometimes  says  that  it  is  irrational  to  be  a 
mere  spoke  in  a  wheel.  Now,  a  loyal  self  is 
always  more  than  a  spoke  in  a  wheel.  But 
still,  at  the  worst,  it  is  better  to  be  a  spoke  in 
the  wheel  than  a  spoke  out  of  the  wheel.  And 
you  never  make  ethical  individuals,  or  enlarge 
their  opportunities,  merely  by  breaking  ties. 
Hence,  so  far  as  a  change  in  family  tradition 
actually  involves  a  loss  of  opportunities  and 
forms    of    loyalty,    which    tradition    used    to 

222 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

emphasize,  our  new  social  order  has  lost  a 
good  thing.  Do  we  see  at  present  just  what 
is  taking  its  place  ?  If  the  patriarchal  family 
must  pass  away  or  be  profoundly  altered, 
surely  we  should  not  gain  thereby  unless  there 
were  to  result  a  new  family  type,  as  rich  in 
appeal  to  our  human  affections  and  our  do- 
mestic instincts  as  the  old  forms  ever  were. 

But  in  our  present  American  life  the  family 
tie  has  been  weakened,  and  yet  no  substitute 
has  been  found.  We  have  so  far  lost  certain 
opportunities  for  loyalty. 

Now,  how  shall  we  hope  to  win  back  these 
opportunities  ?  I  answer :  We  can  win  back 
something  of  what  we  have  lost  if  only  we  in  this 
country  can  get  before  ourselves  and  our  pub- 
lic a  new,  a  transformed  conception  of  what 
loyalty  is.  The  loyalties  of  the  past  have  lost 
their  meaning  for  many  people,  simply  because 
people  have  confounded  loyalty  with  mere 
bondage  to  tradition,  or  with  mere  surrender 
of  individual  rights  and  preferences.  Such 
people  have  forgotten  that  what  has  made 
loyalty  a  good  has  never  been  the  convention 

223 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

which  undertook  to  enforce  it,  but  has  always 
been  the  spiritual  dignity  which  lies  in  being 
loyal. 

As  to  individual  rights  and  preferences,  no- 
body can  ever  attain  either  the  one  or  the  other, 
in  full  measure,  apart  from  loyalty  to  the  clos- 
est and  the  most  lasting  ties  which  the  life  of 
the  individual  in  question  is  capable  of  accept- 
ing with  hearty  willingness.  Ties  once  loyally 
accepted  may  be  broken  in  case,  but  only  in 
case,  the  further  keeping  of  those  ties  intact 
involves  disloyalty  to  the  universal  cause  of 
loyalty.  When  such  reason  for  breaking  ties 
exists,  to  break  them  becomes  a  duty;  and 
then,  indeed,  a  merely  conventional  persist- 
ence in  what  has  become  a  false  position,  is 
itself  a  disloyal  deed.  But  ties  may  never  be 
broken  except  for  the  sake  of  other  and  still 
stronger  ties.  No  one  may  rationally  say: 
"Loyalty  can  no  longer  bind  me,  because, 
from  my  deepest  soul,  I  feel  that  I  want  my 
individual  freedom."  For  any  such  outcry 
comes  from  an  ignorance  of  what  one's  deep- 
est soul  really  wants. 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

Disloyalty  is  moral  suicide.  Many  a  poor 
human  creature  outlives  all  that,  in  the  present 
life,  can  constitute  his  true  self,  —  outlives  as 
a  mere  psychological  specimen  any  human 
expression  of  his  moral  personality,  and  does 
so  because  he  has  failed  to  observe  that  his 
loyalty,  so  far  and  so  long  as  it  has  been  his  own, 
has  been  the  very  heart  of  this  moral  personality. 
When  loyalty  has  once  been  fully  aroused, 
and  has  then  not  merely  blundered  but  died, 
there  may,  indeed,  remain  much  fluttering 
eagerness  of  life;  as  if  a  stranded  ship's  torn 
canvas  were  still  flapping  in  the  wind.  But 
there  cannot  remain  freedom  of  personal  exist- 
ence. For  the  moral  personality  that  once 
was  loyal,  and  that  then  blindly  sought  free- 
dom, is,  to  human  vision,  dead.  What  is,  in 
such  a  case,  left  of  the  so-called  life  is  merely 
an  obituary.  Curious  people  of  prominence 
have  sometimes  expressed  a  wish  to  read  their 
own  obituaries.  But  it  is  hardly  worth  while 
to  live  them. 

People  sometimes  fail  to  observe  this  fact, 
partly  because  they  conceive  loyalty  as  some- 

q  225 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

thing  which  convention  forces  upon  the  indi- 
vidual, and  partly  because  they  also  conceive 
loyalty,  where  it  exists,  as  merely  a  relation 
of  one  individual  to  other  individuals.  Both 
views,  as  we  now  know,  are  wrong.  No  con- 
vention can  predetermine  my  personal  loyalty 
without  my  free  consent.  But  then,  if  I 
loyally  consent,  I  mean  to  be  faithful ;  I  give 
myself;  I  am  henceforth  the  self  thus  given 
over  to  the  cause ;  and  therefore  essential  un- 
faithfulness is,  for  me,  moral  suicide.  Mean- 
while, however,  no  mere  individual  can  ever 
be  my  whole  object  of  loyalty ;  for  to  another 
individual  human  being  I  can  only  say,  "So 
far  as  in  me  lies  I  will  be  loyal  to  our  tie,  to  our 
cause,  to  our  union''  For  this  reason  the 
loyal  are  never  the  mere  slaves  of  convention ; 
and,  on  the  other  hand,  they  can  never  say 
one  to  another,  "Since  we  have  now  grown 
more  or  less  tired  of  one  another,  our  loyalty 
ceases."  To  tire  of  the  cause  to  which  my 
whole  self  is  once  for  all  committed,  is  indeed 
to  tire  of  being  my  moral  self.  I  cannot  win 
my  freedom  in  that  way.     And  no  individual, 

226 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

as  individual,  ever  has  been,  or  ever  can  be, 
my  whole  cause.  My  cause  has  always  been 
a  tie,  an  union  of  various  individuals  in  one. 

Now,  can  our  American  people  learn  this 
lesson  in  so  far  as  this  lesson  is  illustrated  by 
family  ties  ?  Can  they  come  to  see  that  loyalty 
does  not  mean  the  bondage  of  one  individual 
to  another,  but  does  mean  the  exaltation  of 
individuals  to  the  rank  of  true  personalities 
by  virtue  of  their  free  acceptance  of  enduring 
causes,  and  by  virtue  of  their  lifelong  service 
of  their  common  personal  ties  ?  If  this  lesson 
can  be  learned  by  those  serious-minded  peo- 
ple who  have  been  misled,  in  recent  times, 
by  a  false  form  of  individualism,  then  we  shall 
indeed  not  get  rid  of  our  moral  problems,  but 
we  shall  vastly  simplify  our  moral  situation. 
And  a  rational  individualism  will  still  remain 
our  possession.  How  to  treat  the  disloyal 
remains  indeed  a  serious  practical  problem. 
But  we  shall  never  learn  to  deal  with  that 
problem  if  we  suppose  that  the  one  cure  for 
disloyalty,  or  the  one  revenge  which  we  can 
take  upon  the  disloyal,  lies  in  a  new  act  of 

227 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

disloyalty,  that  is,  in  the  mere  assertion  of 
our  individual  freedom.  Train  our  people 
to  know  the  essential  preciousness  of  loyalty. 
In  that  way  only  can  you  hope  to  restore  to  the 
family,  not,  indeed,  all  of  its  older  conven- 
tional forms,  but  its  true  dignity.  The  prob- 
lem, then,  of  the  salvation  of  the  family  life 
of  our  nation  resolves  itself  into  the  general 
problem  of  how  to  train  our  people  at  large 
into  loyalty  to  loyalty. 


The  second  great  opportunity  for  loyalty  is 
furnished,  to  the  great  mass  of  our  people, 
by  their  relations  to  our  various  political  powers 
and  institutions,  and  to  our  larger  social  or- 
ganizations generally.  And  here  we  meet,  in 
the  America  of  to-day,  with  many  signs  that 
our  political  and  social  life  form  at  present  a 
poor  school  in  the  arts  of  loyalty  to  loyalty. 

Loyalty,  indeed,  as  I  have  repeatedly  said, 
we  still  have  present  all  about  us.  The  pre- 
cious plain  and  obscure  people,  who  are  loyal 
to   whatever  they  understand   to   be   worthy 

228 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

causes,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  those  promi- 
nent and  voluntary  public  servants,  who  in  so 
many  cases  are  our  leaders  in  good  works,  — 
these  we  have  so  far  still  with  us.  And  new 
forms  of  loyalty  constantly  appear  in  our  so- 
cial life.  Reform  movements,  trades-unions, 
religious  sects,  partisan  organizations,  both  good 
and  evil,  arouse  in  various  ways  the  loyalty  of 
great  numbers  of  people.  Yet  these  special 
loyalties  do  not  get  rightly  organized  in  such 
form  as  to  further  loyalty  to  loyalty.  Narrow 
loyalties,  side  by  side  with  irrational  forms 
of  individualism  and  with  a  cynical  contempt 
for  all  loyalty,  —  these  are  what  we  too  often 
see  in  the  life  of  our  country.  For  where  the 
special  loyalties  are,  amongst  our  people,  most 
developed,  they  far  too  often  take  the  form  of 
a  loyalty  to  mutually  hostile  partisan  organiza- 
tions, or  to  sects,  or  to  social  classes,  at  the 
expense  of  loyalty  to  the  community  or  to  the 
whole  country.  The  labor-unions  demand  and 
cultivate  the  loyalty  of  their  members;  but 
they  do  so  with  a  far  too  frequent  emphasis 
upon  the  thesis  that  in  order  to  be  loyal  to  his 

229 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

own  social  class,  or,  in  particular,  to  his  union, 
the  laborer  must  disregard  certain  duties  to  the 
community  at  large,  and  to  the  nation,  —  du- 
ties which  loyalty  to  loyalty  seems  obviously 
to  require.  And  party  loyalty  comes  to  be 
misused  by  corrupt  politicians  to  the  harm  of 
the  state.  Therefore  loyalty  to  special  organi- 
zations such  as  labor-unions  comes  to  be  mis- 
directed by  such  leaders  as  are  disloyal,  until 
the  welfare  of  the  whole  social  order  is  en- 
dangered. 

The  result  is  that  the  very  spirit  of  loyalty 
itself  has  come  to  be  regarded  with  suspicion 
by  many  of  our  social  critics,  and  by  many  such 
partisans  of  ethical  individualism  as  those  whose 
various  views  we  studied  in  our  second  lecture. 
Yet  surely  if  such  ethical  individualists,  ob- 
jecting to  the  mischiefs  wrought  by  the  cor- 
rupt politicians,  or  by  the  more  unwise  leaders 
of  organized  labor,  imagine  that  loyalty  is 
responsible  for  these  evils,  such  critics  have 
only  to  turn  to  the  recent  history  of  corporate 
misdeeds  and  of  the  unwise  mismanagement 
of  corporations  in  this  country,  in  order  to  be 

230 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

reminded  that  what  we  want,  at  present,  from 
some  of  the  managers  of  great  corporate  inter- 
ests is  more  loyalty,  and  less  of  the  individual- 
ism of  those  who  seek  power.  And  I  myself 
should  say  that  precisely  the  same  sort  of 
loyalty  is  what  we  want  both  from  the  leaders 
and  from  the  followers  of  organized  labor. 
There  is  here  one  law  for  all. 

Meanwhile,  in  case  of  the  ill-advised  labor 
agitations,  and  of  the  corrupt  party  manage- 
•  ment,  the  cure,  if  it  ever  comes,  surely  will 
include  cultivating  amongst  our  people  the 
spirit  of  loyalty  to  loyalty.  Loyalty  in  itself 
is  never  an  evil.  The  arbitrary  interference 
with  other  men's  loyalties,  the  disloyalty  to 
the  universal  cause  of  loyalty,  is  what  does 
the  mischief  here  in  question.  The  more  the 
laborer  is  loyal  to  his  union,  if  only  he  learns 
to  conceive  this  loyalty  as  an  instance  of 
loyalty  to  loyalty,  the  more  likely  is  his  union 
to  become,  in  the  end,  an  instrument  for  social 
harmony,  and  not,  as  is  now  too  often  the  case, 
an  influence  for  oppression  and  for  social  dis- 
organization.    The  loyalty  which  the  trades- 

231 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

unions  demand  of  their  members  is  at  present 
too  often  viewed  as  a  mere  class  loyalty,  and 
also  as  opposed  to  the  individual  freedom  of 
choice  on  the  part  of  those  laborers  who  do  not 
belong  to  a  given  union,  or  even  to  those  who 
are  in  the  union,  but  whose  right  choice  and 
interests  are  sometimes  hindered  by  their  own 
union  itself.  But  our  people  must  learn  that 
loyalty  does  not  mean  hostility  to  another 
man's  loyalty.  Loyalty  is  for  all  men,  kings 
and  laborers  alike ;  and  whenever  we  learn  to 
recognize  that  fact,  loyalty  will  no  longer  mean 
fraternal  strife,  and  will  no  longer  excuse 
treason  to  the  country  for  the  sake  of  fidelity 
to  corrupt  leaders  or  to  mischievous  agita- 
tions. 

VI 

But  you  may  hereupon  ask  how  the  masses 
of  our  people  are  to  learn  such  a  lesson  of 
loyalty  to  loyalty.  I  admit  that  the  problem 
of  teaching  our  people  what  the  larger  loyalty 
means  is  at  present  peculiarly  difficult.  And 
it  is  rendered  all  the  more  difficult  by  the  fact 

232 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

that,  for  us  Americans,  loyalty  to  our  nation, 
as  a  whole,  is  a  sentiment  that  we  find  to  be  at 
present  by  no  means  as  prominent  in  the  minds 
of  our  people  as  such  sentiments  have  been  in 
the  past  in  other  nations.  Let  me  explain 
what  I  mean  by  this  assertion. 

The  history  of  our  sentiment  towards  our 
national  government  is  somewhat  different  from 
the  history  of  the  sentiment  of  patriotism  in 
other  countries.  We  have  never  had  a  king  as 
the  symbol  of  our  national  dignity  and  unity. 
We  have,  on  the  other  hand,  never  had  to  war 
against  a  privileged  class.  Our  constitutional 
problem  which  led  to  the  Civil  War  was  a 
different  problem  from  that  which  the  French 
Revolution,  or  the  English  political  wars  of  the 
seventeenth  century,  have  exemplified.  At 
one  time  loyalty  to  the  nation  stood,  in  the 
minds  of  many  of  our  people,  in  strong  contrast 
to  their  loyalty  to  their  state,  or  to  their  section 
of  the  country.  This  contrast  led  in  many 
cases  to  a  bitter  conflict  between  the  two  sorts 
of  loyal  interests.  At  last  such  conflicts  had 
to  be  decided  by  war.     The  result  of  the  war 

233 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

was  such  that,  from  one  point  of  view,  the 
national  government  and  the  authority  of  the 
nation,  as  a  whole,  have  won  a  position  that 
is  at  present  politically  unquestionable.  The 
supremacy  of  the  national  government  in  its 
own  sphere  is  well  recognized.  Within  its 
legal  limits,  its  power  is  popularly  regarded 
as  irresistible.  The  appearance  of  its  soldiers 
at  any  moment  of  popular  tumult  is  well  known 
to  be  the  most  effective  expression  of  public 
authority  which  we  have  at  our  disposal,  even 
although  the  body  of  soldiers  which  may  be 
accessible  for  such  a  show  of  force  happens  to 
be  a  very  small  body.  Viewed,  then,  as  a  legal 
authority  and  as  a  physical  force,  our  national 
government  occupies  at  present  a  peculiarly 
secure  position.  And  so,  the  President  of 
the  United  States  is,  at  any  moment,  more 
powerful  than  almost  any  living  monarch.  All 
this,  viewed  as  the  outcome  of  our  long  con- 
stitutional struggle,  would  seem  of  itself  to  sug- 
gest that  the  American  people  have  become 
essentially  loyal  to  our  national  government. 
But,    nevertheless,    is    this    quite    true?     I 

234 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

think  that  almost  any  thoughtful  American  has 
to  admit  that  in  time  of  peace  we  do  not  regard 
our  national  government  with  any  such  intense 
sentiments  of  loyalty  as  would  seem  from  report 
to  be  the  living,  the  vital,  the  constant  posses- 
sion of  Japanese  patriots  when  they  consider 
their  traditional  devotion  to  the  nation  and  to 
their  emperor.  For  them  their  country  is 
part  of  a  religion.  In  their  consciousness  it  is 
said  especially  to  be  the  land  sacred  to  the 
memory  of  their  dead.  The  living,  as  they 
say,  are  but  of  to-day.  The  dead  they  have 
always  with  them  in  memory,  even  if  not  in  the 
determinate  form  of  any  fixed  belief  with  re- 
gard to  the  precise  nature  of  the  life  beyond 
the  grave.  It  is  said  that  the  Japanese  are 
very  free  as  to  the  formulation  of  all  their 
religious  opinions.  But  in  any  case  their 
religion  includes  a  reverence  for  the  historic 
past,  a  devotion  to  the  dead  whose  memory 
makes  their  country  sacred,  and  a  present 
loyalty  which  is  consciously  determined  by 
these  religious  motives. 

Now,  the  most  patriotic  American  can  hardly 

235 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

pretend  that  he  consciously  views  his  country, 
taken  as  a  whole,  in  any  such  religious  way. 
The  country  is  to  us  an  unquestionable  political 
authority.  Were  it  in  danger,  we  should  rally 
to  its  defence.  We  have  a  good  many  formal 
phrases  of  reverence  for  its  history  and  for  its 
dignity, —  phrases  which  had  a  much  more 
concrete  meaning  for  our  predecessors,  when 
the  country  was  smaller,  or  when  the  country 
was  in  greater  danger  from  its  foes.  But,  at 
present,  is  not  our  national  loyalty  somewhat 
in  the  background  of  our  practical  conscious- 
ness? Are  we  really  at  present  a  highly 
patriotic  people?  Certainly,  the  observer  of 
a  presidential  canvass  can  hardly  think  of  that 
canvass  as  a  religious  function,  or  believe  that 
a  profound  reverence  for  the  sacred  memory 
of  the  fathers  is  at  present  a  very  prominent 
factor  in  determining  our  choice  of  the  party 
for  which  we  shall  vote  at  the  polls. 

And  if  you  say  that  political  dissensions  are 
always  of  such  a  nature  as  to  hide  for  the 
moment  patriotism  behind  a  mist  of  present 
perplexities,  you  may  well  be   asked  in  reply 

236 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

whether  anywhere  else,  outside  of  political 
dissensions,  we  have  in  our  national  life  func- 
tions, ceremonies,  expressions  of  practical  de- 
votion to  our  nation  as  an  ideal,  which  serve 
to  keep  our  loyalty  to  our  country  sufficiently 
alive,  and  sufficiently  a  factor  in  our  lives. 
When  can  the  ordinary  American  citizen 
say  in  time  of  peace  that  he  performs  notable 
acts  of  devotion  to  his  country,  such  that  he 
could  describe  those  acts  in  the  terms  that  the 
Speaker  of  the  House  of  Commons  used,  in 
the  story  that  I  reported  to  you  in  my  former 
lecture?  In  other  words,  how  often,  in  your 
own  present  life,  or  in  the  lives  of  your  fellow- 
citizens,  as  now  you  know  them,  is  it  the  case 
that  you  do  something  critical,  significant,  in- 
volving personal  risk  or  sacrifice  to  yourself, 
and  something  which  is  meanwhile  so  inspired 
by  your  love  of  your  nation  as  a  whole  that 
you  can  say  that  just  then  you  have  neither 
eyes  to  see  nor  tongue  to  speak  save  as  the 
country  itself,  in  your  opinion,  requires  you 
to  see  and  to  speak  ? 

Now,  all  this  state  of  things  is  opposed  to 

237 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

our  easily  forming  a  conception  of  what 
loyalty  to  loyalty  demands  of  us  in  our  social 
and  political  relations.  But  the  faults  in 
question  are  not  peculiar  to  our  American 
people.  They  seem  to  my  mind  to  be  merely 
symptomatic  of  something  which  naturally  be- 
longs to  the  general  type  of  civilization  upon 
which,  in  our  national  history,  we  are  entering. 
The  philosopher  Hegel,  in  one  of  his  works 
on  the  philosophy  of  history,  depicts  a  type 
of  civilization,  which,  in  his  mind,  was  espe- 
cially associated  with  the  decline  and  fall  of 
the  Roman  Empire,  as  well  as  with  the  polit- 
ical absolutism  of  the  seventeenth  and  of  the 
early  eighteenth  centuries  in  modern  Europe. 
This  type  itself  was  conceived  by  him  as  a 
general  one,  such  that  it  might  be  realized  in 
very  various  ages  and  civilizations.  Hegel 
called  this  type  of  social  consciousness  the 
type  of  the  social  mind,  or  of  the  "Spirit," 
that  had  become,  as  he  said,  "estranged 
from  itself."  Let  me  explain  what  Hegel 
meant  by  this  phrase. 

A  social  consciousness  can  be  of  the  pro- 

238 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

vincial  type;  that  is,  of  the  type  which  be- 
longs to  small  commonwealths  or  to  provinces, 
such  as  our  own  thirteen  colonies  once  were. 
Or,  on  the  other  hand,  the  social  life  can  be  that 
of  the  great  nation,  which  is  so  vast  that  the 
individuals  concerned  no  longer  recognize 
their  social  unity  in  ways  which  seem  to  them 
homelike.  In  the  province  the  social  mind  is 
naturally  aware  of  itself  as  at  home  with  its 
own.  In  the  Roman  Empire,  or  in  the  state 
of  Louis  XIV,  nobody  is  at  home.  The  gov- 
ernment in  such  vast  social  orders  represents 
the  law,  a  dictation  that  the  individual  finds 
relatively  strange  to  himself.  Or,  again,  the 
power  of  the  state,  even  when  it  is  attractive 
to  the  individual,  still  seems  to  him  like  a 
great  nature  force,  rather  than  like  his  own 
loyal  self,  writ  large.  The  world  of  the 
"  self  -estranged  social  mind"  of  Hegel's  defi- 
nition we  might,  to  use  a  current  phrase- 
ology, characterize  as  the  world  of  the  impe- 
rialistic sort  of  national  consciousness,  or 
simply  as  the  world  of  imperialism.  In  such 
a  world,   as   Hegel   skilfully  points   out,   the 

239 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

individual  comes  to  regard  himself  as  in  rela- 
tion to  the  social  powers,  which,  in  the  first 
place,  he  cannot  understand.  The  fact  that, 
as  in  our  present  civilization,  he  is  formally  a 
free  citizen,  does  not  remove  his  character  of 
self-estrangement  from  the  social  world  in 
which  he  moves.  Furthermore,  since  such 
a  society  is  so  vast  as  to  be  no  longer  easily 
intelligible,  not  only  its  political,  but  also  its 
other  social  powers,  appear  to  the  individual 
in  a  similarly  estranged  and  arbitrary  fashion. 
In  Hegel's  account  stress  is  laid  upon  the  in- 
evitable conflicts  between  wealth  and  govern- 
mental authority,  between  corporate  and  polit- 
ical dignities, — conflicts  which  characterize 
the  imperial  stage  of  civilization  in  question. 
In  the  world  of  the  "  self  -estranged  social 
mind,"  loyalty  passes  into  the  background, 
or  tends  to  disappear  altogether.  The  in- 
dividual seeks  his  own.  He  submits  to  major 
force.  Perhaps  he  finds  such  submission 
welcome,  if  it  secures  him  safety  in  the  acqui- 
sition of  private  gain,  or  of  stately  social  posi- 
tion.    But  welcome  or  unwelcome,  the  author- 

240 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

ity  to  which  he  submits,  be  it  the  authority 
of  the  government  or  the  authority  which 
wealth  and  the  great  aggregations  of  capital 
imply,  is  for  him  just  the  fact,  not  a  matter 
for  loyalty. 

Such  a  formula  as  the  one  which  Hegel 
suggests  is  always  inadequate  to  the  wealth  of 
life.  But  we  are  able  to  understand  our 
national  position  better  when  we  see  that  our 
nation  has  entered  in  these  days  into  the  realm 
of  the  "self -estranged  spirit,"  into  the  social 
realm  where  the  distant  and  irresistible  national 
government,  however  welcome  its  authority 
may  be,  is  at  best  rather  a  guarantee  of  safety, 
an  object  for  political  contest,  and  a  force 
with  which  everybody  must  reckon,  than  the 
opportunity  for  such  loyalty,  as  our  distinctly 
provincial  fathers  used  to  feel  and  express  in 
their  early  utterances  of  the  national  spirit. 
In  the  same  way  in  this  world  of  the  self- 
estranged  spirit,  the  other  forces  of  society 
arouse  our  curiosity,  interest  us  intensely, 
must  be  reckoned  with,  and  may  be  used  more 
or  less  wisely  to  our  advantage.     But  they  are 

r  241 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

tlie  great  industrial  forces,  the  aggregations 
of  capital,  the  combinations  of  enormous 
physical  power,  employed  for  various  social 
ends.  These  vast  social  forces  are  like  the 
forces  of  nature.  They  excite  our  loyalty  as 
little  as  do  the  trade- winds  or  the  blizzard. 
They  leave  our  patriotic  sentiments  cold. 
The  smoke  of  our  civilization  hides  the  very 
heavens  that  used  to  be  so  near,  and  the  stars 
to  which  we  were  once  loyal.  The  conse- 
quences of  such  social  conditions  are  in  part 
inevitable.  I  am  not  planning  any  social 
reform  which  would  wholly  do  away  with 
these  conditions  of  the  world  of  the  self- 
estranged  spirit.  But  these  conditions  of  our 
national  social  order  do  not  make  loyalty  to 
loyalty  a  less  significant  need.  They  only 
deprive  us  of  certain  formerly  accessible  op- 
portunities for  such  loyalty.  They  lead  us 
to  take  refuge  in  our  unpatriotic  sects,  par- 
tisan organizations,  and  unions.  But  they 
make  it  necessary  that  we  should  try  to  see 
how,  under  conditions  as  they  are,  we  can 
best  foster  loyalty  in  its  higher  forms,  not  by 

242 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

destroying  the   sects   or  the   unions,   but   by 
inspiring  them  with  a  new  loyalty  to  loyalty. 

As  the  nation  has  in  so  many  respects  be- 
come estranged  from  our  more  intimate  con- 
sciousness, we  have  lost  a  portion  of  what,  in 
the  days  before  the  war,  used  to  absorb  the 
loyalty  of  a  large  proportion  of  our  country- 
men. I  speak  here  of  loyalty  to  the  separate 
states  and  to  the  various  provinces  of  our 
country.  Such  provincial  loyalty  still  exists, 
but  it  has  no  longer  the  power  that  it  possessed 
when  it  was  able  to  bring  on  civil  war,  and 
very  nearly  to  destroy  the  national  unity. 
Instead  of  dangerous  sectionalism,  we  now 
have  the  other  dangerous  tendency  towards 
a  war  of  classes,  which  the  labor-unions  and 
many  other  symptoms  of  social  discontent  em- 
phasize. We  have  that  corrupt  political  life 
which  partisan  mismanagement  exemplifies. 
And  we  have  that  total  indifference  to  all  forms 
of  loyalty  which  our  seekers  after  individual 
power  sometimes  exhibit,  and  which  occasion- 
ally appears  as  so  serious  an  evil  in  the  conduct 
of  the  business  of  certain  great  corporations. 

243 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

All  these,  I  insist,  are  in  our  present  Ameri- 
can life  symptoms  of  the  state  of  the  self- 
estranged  spirit.  The  decline  of  family  loy- 
alty, of  which  I  spoke  a  while  since,  may  be 
regarded  as  another  symptom  of  the  same 
general  tendency.  Loyalty  itself,  under  such 
conditions,  remains  too  often  unconscious  of 
its  true  office.  Instead  of  developing  into  the 
true  loyalty  to  loyalty,  it  fails  to  recognize  its 
own  in  the  vast  world  of  national  affairs.  It 
is  dazzled  by  the  show  of  power.  It  limits  its 
devotion  to  the  service  of  the  political  party, 
or  of  the  labor-union,  or  of  some  other  sec- 
tarian social  organization.  In  private  life,  as 
we  have  seen,  it  too  often  loses  control  of  the 
family.  In  public  life  it  appears  either  as  the 
service  of  a  faction,  or  as  a  vague  fondness  for 
the  remote  ideals. 

VII 

And  nevertheless,  as  I  insist,  loyalty  to 
loyalty  is  not  a  vague  ideal.  The  spirit  of 
loyalty  is  practical,  is  simple,  is  teachable,  and 
is  for  all  normal  men.  And  in  order  to  train 
loyalty  to  loyalty  in  a  great  mass  of  the  people, 

244 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

what  is  most  of  all  needed  is  to  help  them  to  be 
less  estranged  than  they  are  from  their  own 
social  order. 

To  sum  up,  then,  this  too  lengthy  review, 
the  problem  of  the  training  of  our  American 
people  as  a  whole  to  a  larger  and  richer  social 
loyalty  is  the  problem  of  educating  the  self- 
estranged  spirit  of  our  nation  to  know  itself 
better.  And  now  that  we  have  the  problem 
before  us,  what  solution  can  we  offer  ? 

The  question  of  what  methods  a  training 
for  loyalty  should  follow,  is  the  special  prob- 
lem of  our  next  lecture.  But  there  is  indeed 
one  proposal,  looking  towards  a  better  train- 
ing of  our  nation  to  loyalty,  which  I  have  here 
to  make  as  I  close  this  statement  of  our  na- 
tional needs.  The  proposal  is  this.  We  need 
and  we  are  beginning  to  get,  in  this  country, 
a  new  and  wiser  provincialism.  I  mean  by 
such  provincialism  no  mere  renewal  of  the 
old  sectionalism.  I  mean  the  sort  of  pro- 
vincialism which  makes  people  want  to  ideal- 
ize, to  adorn,  to  ennoble,  to  educate,  their 
own  province;  to  hold  sacred  its  traditions,  to 

245 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

honor  its  worthy  dead,  to  support  and  to 
multiply  its  public  possessions.  I  mean  the 
spirit  which  shows  itself  in  the  multiplying  of 
public  libraries,  in  the  laying  out  of  public 
parks,  in  the  work  of  local  historical  associa- 
tions, in  the  enterprises  of  village  improve- 
ment societies,  — yes,  even  in  the  genea- 
logical societies,  and  in  the  provincial  clubs. 
I  mean  also  the  present  form  of  that  spirit 
which  has  originated,  endowed,  and  fostered  the 
colleges  and  universities  of  our  Western  towns, 
cities,  and  states,  and  which  is  so  well  shown 
throughout  our  country  in  our  American  pride 
in  local  institutions  of  learning.  Of  course, 
we  have  always  had  something  of  this  provin- 
cialism. It  is  assuming  new  forms  amongst  us. 
I  want  to  emphasize  how  much  good  it  can  do 
in  training  us  to  higher  forms  of  loyalty. 

That  such  provincialism  is  a  good  national 
trait  to  possess,  the  examples  of  Germany 
and  of  Great  Britain,  in  their  decidedly  con- 
trasting but  equally  important  ways,  can  show 
us.  The  English  village,  the  English  country 
life,  the  Scotsman's  love  for  his  own  native 

246 


SOME   AMERICAN   PROBLEMS 

province,  — these  are  central  features  in  de- 
termining the  sort  of  loyalty  upon  which  the 
British  Empire  as  a  whole  has  depended. 
Germany,  like  ourselves,  has  suffered  much 
from  sectionalism.  But  even  to-day  the  Ger- 
man national  consciousness  presupposes  and 
depends  upon  a  highly  developed  provincial 
life  and  loyalty.  One  of  the  historical  weak- 
nesses of  France  has  been  such  a  centraliza- 
tion of  power  and  of  social  influence  about 
Paris  as  has  held  in  check  the  full  develop- 
ment of  the  dignity  of  provincial  consciousness 
in  that  country.  Now,  in  our  country  we  do 
not  want  any  mutual  hatred  of  sections.  But 
we  do  want  a  hearty  growth  of  provincial  f 
ideals.  And  we  want  this  growth  just  for 
the  sake  of  the  growth  of  a  more  general  and 
effective  patriotism.  We  want  to  train  na- 
tional loyalty  through  provincial  loyalty.  We 
want  the  ideals  of  the  various  provinces  of 
our  country  to  be  enriched  and  made  definite, 
and  then  to  be  strongly  represented  in  the 
government  of  the  nation.  For,  I  insist,  it  is 
not  the  sect,  it  is  not  the  labor-union,  it  is  not 

247 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OP  LOYALTY 

the  political  partisan  organization,  but  it  is 
the  widely  developed  provincial  loyalty  which 
is  the  best  mediator  between  the  narrower 
interests  of  the  individual  and  the  larger 
patriotism  of  our  nation.  Further  centraliza- 
tion of  power  in  the  national  government,  with- 
out a  constantly  enriched  and  diversified  pro- 
vincial consciousness,  can  only  increase  the 
estrangement  of  our  national  spirit  from  its  own 
life.  On  the  other  hand,  history  shows  that 
if  you  want  a  great  people  to  be  strong,  you 
must  depend  upon  provincial  loyalties  to  me- 
diate between  the  people  and  their  nation. 

The  present  tendency  to  the  centralization 
of  power  in  our  national  government  seems  to 
me,  then,  a  distinct  danger.  It  is  a  substitu- 
tion of  power  for  loyalty.  To  the  increase  of 
a  wise  provincialism  in  our  country,  I  myself 
look  for  the  best  general  social  means  of  train- 
ing our  people  in  loyalty  to  loyalty.  But  of 
course  such  training  in  loyalty  to  loyalty  must 
largely  be  a  matter  of  the  training  of  indi- 
viduals, and  to  the  problem  of  individual  train- 
ing for  loyalty  our  next  lecture  will  be  devoted. 

248 


VI 

TRAINING  FOR  LOYALTY 


LECTURE  VI 

TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

TWO  objections  which  have  been  expressed 
to  me  by  hearers  of  the  foregoing  lectures 
of  this  course  deserve  a  word  of  mention  here, 
as  I  begin  the  present  discussion  of  the  work 
of  training  individuals  for  a  loyal  life. 


The  first  of  these  objections  concerns  my 
use  of  the  term  "  loyalty. "  "  Why,"  so  the  ob- 
jection runs,  "why  can  you  not  avoid  the 
endless  repetition  of  your  one  chosen  term, 
'  loyalty'  ?  Why  would  not  other  words,  such 
as  fidelity,  devotion,  absorption,  trustworthi- 
ness, faithfulness,  express  just  as  well  the 
moral  quality  to  which  you  give  the  one  name 
that  you  have  employed?" 

The  second  objection  concerns  my  defini- 
tion of  the  term  H  loyalty, "  and  is  closely  con- 

251 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

nected  with  the  first  objection.  It  runs  as 
follows:  "Why  do  you  insist  that  the  cause 
which  the  loyal  man  serves  must  be  a  social 
cause?  Why  might  one  not  show  the  same 
essential  moral  quality  that  you  define,  when 
the  cause  that  he  serves  is  something  quite 
unearthly,  or  something  earthly  but  quite 
unsocial  ?  Saint  Simeon  on  his  pillar,  Buddha 
seeking  enlightenment  under  his  lonely  tree, 
the  Greek  geometer  attempting  to  square  the 
circle,  —  were  they  not  as  faithful  as  your 
loyal  man  is?  And  were  their  causes  social 
causes?" 

I  reply  to  these  objections  together.  I  have 
defined  my  present  usage  of  the  popular  term 
"loyalty"  in  my  own  distinctly  technical  way. 
Loyalty  so  far  means  for  us,  in  these  lectures, 
the  willing,  the  thoroughgoing,  and  the  prac- 
tical devotion  of  a  self  to  a  cause.  And  a 
cause  means,  in  these  lectures,  something 
that  is  conceived  by  its  loyal  servant  as  unify- 
ing the  lives  of  various  human  beg®  into  one 
life.  Now,  I  know  of  no  other  word  whose 
popular  usage  comes  closer  than  does  that  of 

252 


TRAINING   FOR  LOYALTY 

the  good  old  word  "loyalty"  to  embodying  the 
meaning  that  I  have  given  to  the  term.  I 
think,  then,  that  I  have  a  right  to  my  technical 
definition.  It  is  based  upon  popular  usage,  and 
goes  beyond  that  usage  only  in  a  very  natural 
way.  I  intend  soon  to  show  you  that  we 
are  now  ready  to  substitute  for  this  first  tech- 
nical definition  another  and  a  still  more  sig- 
nificant definition  which  will  reveal  to  us,  for 
the  first  time,  the  true  spirit  of  the  enterprise 
in  which  all  the  loyal  are  actually  engaged. 
But  I  can  reach  this  higher  definition  only 
through  the  simpler  definition.  To  that,  in- 
adequate as  it  is,  my  discussion  must  cling 
until  we  are  ready  for  something  better. 

Granting,  however,  my  own  definition  of 
my  term,  I  cannot  easily  use  any  other  popular 
or  philosophical  term  in  the  same  way.  I 
cannot  substitute  the  word  "devotion"  for  the 
term  "loyalty,  "since  loyalty  is  to  my  mind  a 
very  special  kind  of  devotion.  A  man  might 
be  devoted  to  the  pursuit  of  pleasure;  but 
that  would  not  make  him  loyal.  Fidelity, 
again,  is,  in  my  own  account,  but  one  aspect 

253 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

of  loyalty.  Loyalty  includes  fidelity,  but 
means  more,  since,  besides  fidelity,  decisive- 
ness and  the  acceptance  of  a  cause  also  be- 
long to  loyalty ;  and  the  fidelity  of  a  dog  to  his 
master  is  only  a  pathetic  hint  of  loyalty,  or  a 
fragment  of  the  disposition  that,  in  human 
beings,  expresses  itself  in  the  full  reasonable- 
ness of  loyal  life.  The  same  comment  holds 
in  case  of  the  word  "faithfulness."  As  for  ab- 
sorption, the  loyal  are  absorbed  in  their  cause, 
but  the  angry  man  is  absorbed  in  his  pas- 
sion. Yet  such  absorption  is  not  what  I  have 
in  mind.  The  loyal,  again,  possess  trust- 
worthiness,  but  a  watch  may  also  be  trust- 
worthy ;  and  that  word  ill  expresses  the  vol- 
untary nature  of  the  spirit  of  loyalty. 

I  cannot  find,  then,  another  term  to  meet 
my  purpose.  My  usage  of  this  term  is  justi- 
fied mainly  by  that  simplification  of  our  con- 
ceptions of  the  moral  life  which  our  theory 
has  made  possible. 

As  for  my  insistence  upon  the  social  aspect 
of  the  loyal  life,  that  insistence  implies  two 
assertions  about  such  cases   as   those  of  the 

254 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

lonely  saint  on  the  pillar,  or  Buddha  seeking 
enlightenment,  or  the  geometer  trying  to  solve 
his  problem.  The  first  assertion  is  that  all 
such  lonely  enterprises  have  moral  value  only 
when  they  are  indeed  a  part  of  one's  service 
of  the  cause  of  humanity.  The  saint  on  the 
pillar  was  presumably  trying  to  add  to  the 
store  of  merits  which  the  universal  church 
was  supposed  to  possess.  If  so,  he  had  a 
social  cause  which  he  served ;  namely,  the 
church, — the  mystic  union  of  all  the  faithful. 
His  cause  may  have  been  wrongly  conceived 
by  him,  but  it  was,  in  our  sense,  a  cause,  and 
a  social  one.  The  Buddha  of  the  legend  was 
seeking  to  save  not  only  himself  but  mankind. 
He  was  loyal,  therefore,  in  our  sense.  As  for 
the  geometer,  his  search  for  the  solution  of  his 
problem  concerned  one  of  the  deepest  com- 
mon interests  of  the  human  mind;  namely, 
an  interest  in  the  discovery  and  possession  of 
rational  truth.  Truth  is  for  everybody;  and 
it  unifies  the  lives  of  all  men.  Whoever  seeks 
for  a  truth,  as  important  as  geometrical  truth 
is,  and  seeks  it  with  a  serious  devotion,  has  a 

255 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

social  cause.  And  no  utterly  lonely  devotion 
to  anything  is  morally  worthy  of  a  human 
being. 

My  second  assertion  as  to  the  social  aspect 
of  causes  is  this.  Sometimes  men  have  indeed 
sought  to  serve  God  in  an  actually  unsocial 
way,  and  have  been  devoted  to  a  world  of 
unseen  and  superhuman  beings.  But  such 
beings,  if  they  are  real  and  are  worthy  of  a 
moral  devotion  at  all,  are  worthy  of  the  devo- 
tion of  all  mankind ;  and  in  such  devotion,  if 
it  is  indeed  justified,  all  men  may  be  blessed. 
The  worship  of  the  gods,  even  when  a  lonely 
worshipper  has  expressly  tried  not  to  think  of 
his  fellows,  has  therefore  always  implied  a 
loyalty  to  the  cause  of  one's  own  people,  or 
else  of  mankind  at  large.  The  Christian's 
devotion  to  God  is  inseparably  bound  up  with 
his  loyalty  to  the  mystic  union  of  the  faithful 
in  the  church.  The  non-social  aspect  of 
genuine  worship  is  therefore  but  apparent. 
Religion  seeks  a  certain  fulfilment  of  the 
purposes  of  the  moral  life,  — a  fulfilment 
which   we   are   hereafter   to   study.     On   the 

256 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

other  hand,  loyalty  itself,  as  a  devotion  to  a 
cause  which  unifies  many  human  lives,  is,  as 
we  shall  see,  profoundly  religious  in  its  spirit. 
For  men,  viewed  merely  as  natural  phe- 
nomena, are  many,  and  mutually  conflicting 
creatures.  '  Loyalty  aims  at  their  unity,  and 
such  unity,  as  we  shall  see,  is  always  some- 
thing that  has  its  supernatural  meaning.  In 
brief,  then,  to  worship  divine  powers  in  a 
genuinely  ethical  spirit,  is  always  to  serve  a 
cause  which  is  also,  in  the  human  sense, 
social, — the  cause  of  the  state,  or  of  the  church, 
or  of  humanity;  while,  on  the  other  hand, 
loyally  to  serve  causes  is  to  aim  to  give  hu- 
man life  a  supernatural,  — an  essentially  divine 
meaning. 

And  these  are  the  reasons  why  I  have  in- 
sisted upon  the  social  aspect  of  loyalty. 

Bear,  then,  I  pray  you,  with  my  too  often 
repeated  term ;  accept  its  apparently  too 
narrow  definition.  We  are  on  the  way 
towards  a  view  of  the  spiritual  unity  of  all 
human  life, — a  view  which  may  serve  to 
justify  this    technical   usage  of   a   term,  this 

s  257 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

long  dwelling  upon  the  details  of  the  moral 
life,  these  seemingly  commonplace  com- 
ments upon   social  problems. 

II 

How  shall  individuals  be  trained  for  a  loyal 
life?  That  is  the  question  of  the  present 
lecture.  In  trying  to  answer  this  question  I 
shall  first  dwell,  briefly,  and  very  inadequately, 
upon  the  place  that  a  training  for  loyalty 
should  occupy  in  the  education  of  the  young. 
Then  I  shall  speak  of  the  way  in  which  ma- 
ture people  are  trained  for  such  forms  of  loy- 
alty as  belong  to  the  actual  business  of  the 
social  world. 

Whether  you  like  my  use  of  terms  or  not, 
you  will  agree  that  training  the  young  for  a 
willing  and  thoroughgoing  devotion  of  the 
self  to  a  social  cause,  must  be  a  long  and 
manifold  task.  Before  true  loyalty  can  ap- 
pear in  any  but  rather  crude  and  fragmen- 
tary forms  in  the  life  of  a  growing  human 
being,  a  long  discipline  of  the  whole  mind 
must  have  preceded.     One  must  have  become 

258 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

capable  of  conceiving  what  a  social  cause  is. 
One  must  have  learned  decisiveness  and 
fidelity  through  an  elaborate  general  prepara- 
tion of  the  will.  Therefore,  while  the  begin- 
nings of  loyalty  extend  far  back  into  the  life 
of  childhood,  its  full  development  must  be- 
long to  mature  years.  Affection,  obedience, 
a  gradually  increasing  persistence  in  whole- 
some activities,  a  growing  patience  and  self- 
control,  all  these,  in  the  natural  growth  of  a 
human  being,  are  preliminaries  to  the  more 
elaborate  forms  of  loyalty.  By  themselves 
they  are  not  loyalty.  In  accordance  with  the 
general  trend  of  modern  educational  theory, 
we  therefore  naturally  point  out  that,  in  train- 
ing children  for  future  loyalty,  teachers  must 
avoid  trying  to  awaken  any  particular  sort  of 
loyalty  before  its  fitting  basis  is  laid,  and 
before  a  sufficient  age  has  been  reached.  The 
basis  in  question  involves  a  rich  development 
of  social  habits.  The  age  for  true  and  system- 
atic loyalty  can  hardly  precede  adolescence. 
One  must  obtain  the  material  for  a  moral 
personality  before  a  true  conscience  can  be 

259 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

won.     Conscience,   as   we   have   seen,   is   the 
flower  and  not  the  root  of  the  moral  life. 

But  there  is  one  contribution  which  child- 
hood early  makes  to  a  possible  future  loyalty, 
—  a  contribution  which  we  sometimes  fail 
to  take  sufficiently  into  account.  That  con- 
tribution is  the  well-known  disposition  to 
idealize  heroes  and  adventures,  to  live  an 
imaginary  life,  to  have  ideal  comrades,  and  to 
dream  of  possible  great  enterprises.  I  have 
for  years  insisted,  along  with  many  others  who 
have  studied  our  educational  problems,  that 
these  arts  of  idealization  which  childhood  so 
often  and  so  spontaneously  practises,  are  not 
only  in  themselves  fascinating  and  joyous,  but 
are  also  a  very  important  preliminary  to  that 
power  to  conceive  the  true  nature  of  social 
causes  upon  which  later  loyalty  depends.  If 
I  have  never  been  fascinated  in  childhood  by 
my  heroes  and  by  the  wonders  of  life,  it  is 
harder  to  fascinate  me  later  with  the  call  of 
duty.  Loyalty,  as  we  have  already  seen,  and 
as  we  have  yet  further  to  see,  is  an  idealizing 
of  human  life,   a  communion   with   invisible 

260 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

aspects  of  our  social  existence.  Too  great 
literalness  in  the  interpretation  of  human 
relations  is,  therefore,  a  foe  to  the  develop- 
ment of  loyalty.  If  my  neighbor  is  to  me 
merely  a  creature  of  a  day,  who  walks  and 
eats  and  talks  and  buys  and  sells,  I  shall  never 
learn  to  be  loyal  to  his  cause  and  to  mine. 
But  the  child  who  plays  with  ideal  comrades, 
or  who  idealizes  with  an  unconscious  wisdom 
our  literal  doings  and  his  own,  is,  in  his  own 
way,  getting  glimpses  of  that  real  spiritual 
world  whose  truth  and  whose  unity  we  have 
hereafter  more  fully  to  consider.  It  is  in  his 
fantasies,  then,  that  a  child  begins  to  enter 
into  the  kingdom  of  heaven.  Such  fantasies 
may  need  to  be  carefully  guarded.  They 
may  take  a  dangerous  or  even  a  disastrous 
turn  in  the  life  of  one  or  another  child.  But 
in  their  better  phases  they  are  not  mere  illu- 
sions and  are  great  blessings.  They  are 
prophecies  of  the  coming  of  conscience,  and 
of  a  possible  union  with  the  world  of  an 
actually  divine  truth. 

Yet   since   loyalty   involves   conduct,    such 

261 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

fantasies  of  childhood  are  indeed  but  a  prep- 
aration for  loyalty.  And  higher  loyalty  be- 
longs later.  But  in  normal  childhood  there 
do  indeed  appear,  in  a  fragmentary  way, 
forms  of  conduct  which  already  include  a 
simple,  but,  so  far  as  it  goes,  an  actual  loy- 
alty to  the  causes  the  child  already  under- 
stands. You  all  know  some  of  these  forms. 
The  members  of  a  gang  of  boys,  sometimes  of 
bad  boys,  show  a  certain  loyalty  to  the  cause 
represented  by  the  gang.  School  children 
develop  the  code  of  honor  that  forbids  the 
telling  of  tales  to  the  teacher.  Truthfulness 
becomes  a  conscious  virtue  early  in  normal 
childhood,  and  has  its  own  childish  casuistry, 
—  often  an  amusing  one. 

The  rule,  of  course,  regarding  all  such 
childhood  beginnings  of  loyalty  is  that  we 
should  always  respect  whatever  is  in  the 
least  socially  tolerable  about  the  expressions 
of  even  the  crudest  loyalty.  The  parent  or 
teacher  who  trifles  with  the  code  of  honor  of 
children  by  encouraging  the  talebearer,  or 
by  even  requiring  that  a  child  should  become 

262 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

an  informer,  is  simply  encouraging  disloyalty. 
He  outrages  the  embryonic  conscience  of  his 
young  charges. 

For  the  rest,  children  appreciate  the  loy- 
alty or  disloyalty  of  our  conduct  towards  them 
sooner  than  they  can  define  their  own  duty. 
And  the  one  who  would  train  for  loyalty  must 
therefore  be,  in  his  dealings  with  children, 
peculiarly  scrupulous  about  his  own  loyalty. 

Ill 

But  after  all,  whatever  be  the  best  train- 
ing of  childhood  for  a  coming  moral  life,  the 
rapid  development  of  loyalty  itself  belongs 
to  adolescence,  just  as  the  outcome  of  that 
development  is  reached  only  in  mature  life. 
Upon  the  importance  of  youth  as  the  natural 
period  for  training  in  more  elaborate  forms  of 
loyal  conduct,  our  recent  authority  regarding 
adolescence,  President  Stanley  Hall,  has  in- 
sisted. In  normal  youth  various  forms  of 
loyalty,  of  a  highly  complex  character,  appear 
with  a  great  deal  of  spontaneity.  Two  of 
these  forms  have  become  important  in  the  life 

263 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

of  the  youth  of  many  nations,  and  certainly 
in  the  life  of  our  own  American  youth  to-day. 
The  one  form  is  loyalty  to  the  fraternal  or- 
ganization,—  very  generally  to  a  secret  fra- 
ternity. The  other  form  is  loyalty  to  one's 
own  side  in  an  athletic  contest,  or  to  one's 
college  or  other  institution,  viewed  as  an 
athletic    entity. 

Both  of  these  forms  of  loyalty  have  their 
excesses,  and  lead  to  well-known  abuses.  The 
secret  fraternities  may  become  organizations 
for  general  mischief  and  disorder;  the  ath- 
letic contests  may  involve  overmuch  passion, 
and  may  even  do  harm  to  the  general  loyalty 
by  fostering  the  spirit  of  unfair  play.  Now,  it 
is  notable  that  both  of  these  sorts  of  abuses 
increase  when  the  fraternities  and  the  athletic 
organizations  are  imitated  in  the  lower  schools 
by  the  children.  The  resulting  dangers  show 
that  loyalty  ought  not  to  be  a  prematurely 
forced  plant.  It  should  grow,  in  its  various 
forms,  in  its  due  time.  Hence  those  in  charge 
of  our  secondary  schools  should  not  be  misled 
by  their  knowledge  of  the  preciousness  of  loy- 

264 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

alty  into  encouraging  an  overhasty  develop- 
ment of  secret  fraternities  and  of  fully  formed 
athletic  organizations  amongst  those  who  are 
not  old  enough  to  reap  the  fruits  of  such  forms 
of  loyalty.  The  coming  of  true  loyalty  may  be 
seriously  hindered  by  the  too  early  organiza- 
tion of  the  perfectly  natural  gang  of  boys  into 
some  too  elaborate  social  structure.  Harm 
has  been  done  of  late  years  by  too  much  aping 
of  athletic  and  fraternity  life  in  connection  with 
the  lower  grades  of  schools. 

But  when  youth  is  fairly  reached,  and  the 
secret  fraternity  and  the  athletic  organization 
become  spontaneously  prominent,  it  is  plain 
that  our  efforts  to  train  our  youth  to  a  higher 
life  must  recognize  these  natural  types  of 
loyalty,  but  must  do  so  without  overempha- 
sizing their  cruder  features.  We  must  always 
build  upon  what  we  have;  and  therefore  any 
unnecessary  hostility  to  the  fraternities  and  to 
the  athletic  life  is  profoundly  objectionable. 
But  the  most  unhappy  features  of  the  athletic, 
and  in  some  measure  of  the  fraternity,  life  in 
our  colleges  and  universities  are  due  to  the 

265 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

false  social  prominence  which  the  public  opin- 
ion of  those  who  have  nothing  to  do  with  college 
life  often  forces  upon  our  youth.  The  athletic 
evils,  such  as  they  are,  of  our  academic  world, 
are  not  due  to  the  college  students  themselves 
nearly  so  much  as  to  the  absurd  social  promi- 
nence which  the  newspapers  and  the  vast 
modern  crowds  give  to  contests  which  ought 
to  be  cheerful  youthful  sports,  wherein  a 
natural  loyalty  is  to  be  trained,  but  wherein  a 
national  prominence  of  the  games  and  the  con- 
testants is  utterly  out  of  place.  It  is  as  absurd 
to  overemphasize  such  matters  as  it  is  wicked  to 
interfere  unnecessarily  with  any  other  aspect 
of  youthful  moral  development.  It  is  the 
extravagant  publicity  of  our  intercollegiate 
sports  which  is  responsible  for  their  principal 
evils.  Leave  wholesome  youth  to  their  natural 
life,  not  irritated  and  not  aroused  to  unwise 
emotions  by  the  exaggerated  comments  of  the 
press,  and  our  athletic  organizations  would 
serve  their  proper  function  of  training  the 
muscles  as  well  as  the  souls  of  our  youth  to 
loyalty.     As   for  the  fraternities,  — the   false 

266 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

social  prominence  which  their  graduate  mem- 
bers sometimes  force  upon  them  is  a  distinct 
hindrance  to  the  work  that  they  can  do  in  train- 
ing youth  for  a  loyal  life. 

Fair  play  in  sport  is  a  peculiarly  good  instance 
of  loyalty.  And  in  insisting  upon  the  spirit 
of  fair  play,  the  elders  who  lead  and  who  or- 
ganize our  youthful  sports  can  do  a  great  work 
for  the  nation.  The  coach,  or  the  other  leader 
in  college  sports,  to  whom  fair  play  is  not  a  first 
concern,  is  simply  a  traitor  to  our  youth  and  to 
our  nation.  If  the  doctrine  of  these  lectures 
is  right,  we  can  see  with  what  stupendous  hu- 
man interests  he  is  trifling. 

As  to  other  ways  in  which  the  loyalty  of  our 
youth  can  be  trained,  we  still  too  much  lack, 
in  this  country,  dignified  modes  of  celebrating 
great  occasions.  Once  the  Fourth  of  July 
was  a  day  for  training  patriotic  loyalty ;  it  has 
now  degenerated,  and  is  probably  irretrievably 
lost  to  the  cause  of  true  loyalty.  Memorial 
Day  and  our  national  Thanksgiving  Day  are 
our  best  holidays  for  expressing  loyalty  to  the 
community  and  to  the  nation.     Let  us  cherish 

267 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  LOYALTY 

them,  and  preserve  them  from  desecration. 
But  with  us  both  holidays  and  public  cere- 
monials have  a  certain  democratic  tendency  to 
degeneration.  We  need  more  means  for  sym- 
bolizing loyalty,  both  in  public  monuments 
and  in  ceremonials,  as  well  as  in  forms  of 
common  public  service  to  our  community. 
European  nations  glorify  the  army  as  a  prac- 
tical teacher  of  loyalty  to  the  youth.  The 
loyalty  thus  won  is  mingled  with  the  war-spirit, 
and  is  therefore  dear  bought.  But  we  unques- 
tionably need  substitutes  for  military  service 
as  a  means  of  training  for  a  loyal  life.  It  be- 
longs to  the  task  of  our  social  leaders  to  invent 
and  to  popularize  such  substitutes.  Herein  lies 
one  of  the  great  undertakings  of   the  future. 

IV 

The  true  sphere  of  a  complete  loyalty  is 
mature  life.  We  constantly  need,  all  of  us, 
individual  training  in  the  art  of  loyalty. 
How  is  this  work  accomplished  in  the  social 
order  ?  In  answering  this  question,  let  history 
and  our  daily  social  experience  be  our  guides. 

268 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

The  main  lessons  that  these  guides  teach  us,  as 
I  think,  are  three :  First,  our  loyalty  is  trained  / 
and  kept  alive  by  the  influence  of  personal 
leaders.  Secondly,  the  higher  forms  of  train- 
ing for  loyalty  involve  a  momentous  process 
which  I  shall  call  the  Idealizing  of  the  Cause. 
Thirdly,  loyalty  is  especially  perfected  through 
great  strains,  labors,  and  sacrifices  in  the  ser-  , 
vice  of  the  cause. 

Of  the  three  factors  here  mentioned,  the 
first  and  second  are  inseparable  and  universal. 
If  we  are  to  be  made  loyal,  we  want  personal 
leaders,  and  highly  idealized  causes.  In  ex- 
ceptional cases  a  man  may  seem  to  be  his  own 
sole  leader  in  loyalty.  But  this  is  rare.  Al- 
ways, to  be  sure,  a  loyal  man  uses  his  own 
leadership,  since,  as  we  saw  in  our  fourth  lec- 
ture, his  conscience  is  his  leader.  But  usually 
he  needs  the  aid  of  other  personal  leaders  be- 
sides himself.  As  for  the  idealizing  of  the 
cause,  — I  have  called  it  a  momentous  process. 
How  momentous  we  shall  soon  see.  For  it  is 
by  this  process  that  we  are  introduced  into  the 
true  spiritual  world. 

269 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

Let  me  illustrate  my  theses.  We  are  all 
familiar  with  the  history  of  clubs  and  of  sec- 
tarian social  organizations  generally.  Now 
how  are  these  social  enterprises,  good  or  evil, 
made  to  succeed  ? 

You  all  know  that  if  a  club  or  a  sect  is  to  be 
begun,  or  if  a  political  or  social  movement  is 
to  be  rendered  effective,  two  things  are  neces- 
sary: first,  a  leader,  or  a  group  of  leaders, 
eager,  enthusiastic,  convinced,  or,  at  the  worst, 
capable  of  speaking  as  if  they  were  convinced,  — 
leaders  persistent,  obstinate,  and  in  their  own 
fitting  way  aggressive ;  and,  secondly,  a  cause 
that  can  be  idealized  so  that,  when  the  leaders 
talk  of  it  in  their  glowing  exhortations,  it  seems 
to  be  a  sort  of  supernatural  being,  in  one  sense 
impersonal,  but  in  another  sense  capable  of 
being  personified,  an  exalted  but  still  per- 
sonally interesting  spiritual  power.  The  two 
aspects  of  loyalty,  the  personal  and  the  seem- 
ingly superpersonal,  must  thus  be  emphasized 
together. 

Consider,  in  particular,  the  process  of  mak- 
ing almost  any  new  club  succeed.     Some  group 

270 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

of  persons,  sometimes  a  single  leader,  must  be 
found,  willing  to  devote  time  and  energy  to 
directing  the  new  organization.  The  leader 
or  leaders  must  believe  the  enterprise  worth 
while,  must  proclaim  its  importance  in  vigor- 
ous terms,  and  must  patiently  stand  by  the 
club  through  all  the  doubtful  first  period  of  its 
existence.  But  the  personal  influence  of  these 
leaders  cannot  be  enough  to  arouse  any  genuine 
loyalty  in  the  members  of  the  club,  unless  the 
organization  itself  can  be  made  to  appear  as 
a  sort  of  ideal  personality,  of  a  higher  than 
merely  human  type.  If  the  leaders  impress 
their  companions  as  being  people  who  are 
concerned  merely  with  their  own  private  im- 
portance, they  in  vain  persist  in  their  propa- 
ganda. In  that  case  the  club  is  nicknamed  as 
their  particular  pet  or  as  their  fad ;  one  makes 
light  of  their  energy,  one  maligns  their  motives, 
and  the  club  crumbles  into  nothing.  In  order 
to  succeed,  the  leaders  must  give  to  the  club 
the  character  of  a  sort  of  ideal  entity,  often 
of  an  improvised  mythological  goddess,  who 
is  to  be  conceived  as  favoring  her  devotees, 

271 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

as  bestowing  upon  them  extraordinary  social 
or  spiritual  benefits.  Even  the  convivial  festi- 
vals of  the  club,  if  such  festivals  there  be, 
must  have  some  sort  of  ceremonial  dignity 
about  them, — a  dignity  such  as  suggests  the 
impersonal  or  superpersonal  rank  of  the  club 
as  an  ideal.  The  club  must  become  a  cause, 
in  whose  service  the  members  are  one.  If  it  is 
a  reform  club,  or  other  body  engaged  in  a 
propaganda,  then  social  interests  that  lie  out- 
side of  the  boundaries  of  the  club's  separate 
being  serve  to  define  this  cause;  the  club  is 
then  merely  an  instrument  to  further  a  loyalty 
that  is  intelligible  apart  from  the  existence  of 
this  very  instrument;  and  in  such  a  case  the 
leaders  of  the  club  have  mainly  to  insist  effec- 
tively upon  the  importance  of  this  already  exist- 
ing loyalty.  But  if  the  club  is  to  be  an  end  in 
itself,  —  an  organization  that  exists  for  its  own 
sake  and  for  the  sake  of  its  own  members,  — 
the  process  of  learning  to  ascribe  to  the  new 
club  the  ideal  dignity  of  a  common  cause  is 
sometimes  a  difficult  process.  The  devices 
used  by  the  leaders  are,  upon  occasion,  very 

272 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

direct.  One  simply  calls  the  club  an  ideal; 
one  personifies  it  in  various  poetical  ways; 
and  one  praises  it  as  a  sort  of  superhuman 
being.  Or,  more  practically  still,  one  incor- 
porates the  club,  endows  it  with  a  legal  per- 
sonality, and  makes  it  a  property  owner. 
But  other  devices  are  more  indirect.  Club 
ceremonials  and  festivals,  some  more  or  less 
rudimentary  club  ritual,  perhaps  also  the 
various  familiar  devices  of  the  secret  societies, 
the  air  of  mystery,  club  emblems  and  symbols, 
—  all  serve  to  give  to  the  club  the  appearances, 
at  least,  of  a  fitting  cause  for  the  exercise  of 
loyalty.  Another  indirect  device  consists  in 
naming  the  club  after  famous  or  beloved  peo- 
ple, now  dead,  whose  honor  and  whose  mem- 
ory idealize  the  new  organization.  Or,  again, 
one  arbitrarily  calls  the  club  ancient  and  dig- 
nifies it  by  a  more  or  less  conscious  myth  about 
its  past.  All  such  devices  serve  to  call  out 
loyalty  in  ways  that  may  be  comparatively 
trivial,  but  that  may  also  be  of  a  very  profound 
significance,  if  the  new  organization  is  actually 
a  fitting  object  of  loyalty. 

t  273 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

With  proper  changes  the  foregoing  account 
applies  to  the  plans  that  are  useful  in  estab- 
lishing a  new  religious  sect.  Always  you  find 
the  same  union  of  personal  enthusiasm  on  the 
part  of  leaders  with  a  disposition  to  define  the 
ideal  of  the  new  organization  in  terms  that 
transcend  the  limits  of  individual  human  life. 
Man,  even  when  he  is  a  member  of  a  purely 
convivial  social  body,  is  prone  to  try  to  con- 
ceive both  his  own  life,  and  also  that  of  this 
social  body,  in  superhuman  terms.  Expe- 
rience thus  shows  that  a  procedure  of  the  sort 
just  described  does  succeed,  in  many  cases,  in 
training  people  —  sometimes  small  groups, 
sometimes  great  bodies  of  men  —  to  new  forms 
of  loyalty. 

The  plans  whereby  an  actually  ancient 
institution  is  kept  in  possession  of  the  loyalty 
of  its  own  natural  servants  do  not  in  their 
essence  differ  from  the  ones  just  characterized. 
The  loyalty  of  a  body  of  alumni  to  their 
university  is  a  classic  instance  of  a  loyalty 
kept  alive  by  the  union  of  an  institution  with 
the   personality   of  its   living  leaders.     Even 

274 


I 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

so,  the  loyalty  of  the  sons  of  a  subjugated 
nationality,  such  as  the  Irish  or  the  Poles,  to 
their  country,  is  kept  alive  through  precisely 
such  an  union  of  the  influence  of  individual 
leaders  with  the  more  impersonal  reverence 
for  the  idealized,  although  no  longer  politi- 
cally existent  nationality. 

You  see,  so  far,  how  the  personal  leaders  and 
the  superhuman  cause  are  inseparable  in  the 
training  of  loyalty.  The  cause  comes  to  be 
idealized  partly  because  the  leaders  so  vigor- 
ously insist  that  it  is  indeed  ideal.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  leaders  become  and  remain 
personally  efficacious  by  reason  of  the  dignity 
that  the  cause  confers  upon  them.  Were  they 
considered  apart  from  their  cause,  they  would 
seem  to  be  merely  ambitious  propagandists, 
seeking  gain  or  notoriety.  To  those  without 
the  range  of  their  personal  influence,  they  often 
seem  such.  Yet  if  they  did  not  speak  for  the 
cause,  and  so  give  to  it  the  life  of  their  personal 
enthusiasm,  nobody  would  be  taught  to  regard 
their  cause  as  ideal.  The  cause  thus  needs  to 
become  incarnate,  as  it  were,  in  the  persons  of 

275 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

the  leaders ;  but  the  leaders  get  their  personal 
influence  through  the  fact  that  they  seem  to  be 
incarnations  of  the  cause. 

Facts  of  this  sort  are  familiar.  You  can 
observe  them  whenever  you  attend  an  anni- 
versary meeting,  or  other  such  ceremonial,  of 
your  own  club,  and  whenever  you  listen  to 
those  who  represent  any  successful  propa- 
ganda. But  how  vastly  significant  such  facts 
may  be  in  determining  the  lives  of  whole 
generations  and  nations  and  races  of  men,  you 
can  only  judge  if  you  read  the  general  history 
of  humanity  in  the  light  of  the  principles  now 
pointed  out.  If  our  philosophy  of  loyalty  has 
any  truth,  the  history  of  human  loyalty  con- 
cerns whatever  is  most  important  in  the  annals 
of  mankind.  And  the  whole  history  of  loyalty 
is  the  history  of  the  inseparable  union  of  the 
personal  influence  of  leaders  with  the  tendency 
to  idealize  causes. 

V 

But  the  idealization  of  the  cause,  although 
never  possible  without  the  aid  of  living  per- 

276 


TRAINING   FOR  LOYALTY 

sons,  may  also  depend  upon  still  other  factors 
than  the  direct  personal  influence  of  leaders. 
When  we  consider  the  general  history  of  loyalty 
amongst  men,  our  attention  is  soon  attracted 
to  a  deeply  instructive  process  whereby,  in 
certain  cases,  — some  of  them  very  great 
and  wonderful  cases,  — causes  have  been  ideal- 
ized not  only  by  the  personal  influence  of  the 
leaders,  but  also  by  certain  deeply  pathetic 
motives  to  which  the  leaders  could  constantly 
appeal.  I  refer  to  the  process  illustrated  by 
the  history  of  lost  causes. 

I  referred  a  moment  ago  to  the  loyalty  of 
the  Irish  and  of  the  Poles  to  their  own  lost 
nationalities.  Now  such  loyalty  to  a  lost 
cause  may  long  survive,  not  merely  in  the 
more  or  less  unreal  form  of  memories  and 
sentiments,  but  in  a  genuinely  practical  way. 
And  such  loyalty  to  a  lost  cause  may  be  some- 
thing that  far  transcends  the  power  of  any 
mere  habit.  New  plans,  endless  conspiracies, 
fruitful  social  enterprises,  great  political  or- 
ganizations,—  yes,  in  the  extreme  case, — 
new  religions,  may  grow  up  upon  the  basis 

277 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

of  such  a  loyalty  to  a  cause  whose  worldly 
fortunes  seem  lost,  but  whose  vitality  may  out- 
last centuries,  and  may  involve  much  novel 
growth  of  opinion,  of  custom,  and  of  ideals. 

The  most  notable  religious  development 
which  the  world  has  ever  seen,  the  religion  of 
Israel,  together  with  its  successor,  Christian- 
ity, — this  whole  religious  evolution,  — is,  as  we 
must  here  point  out,  the  historical  result  of  a 
national  loyalty  to  a  lost  cause.  The  political 
unity  of  all  the  tribes  of  Israel,  attained  but 
for  a  moment,  so  to  speak,  under  David  and 
Solomon,  and  then  lost  from  the  visible  world 
of  history,  survived  as  an  ideal.  Only  as 
such  a  lost  ideal  could  this  conception  of  what 
Israel  once  was  and  ought  again  to  be  inspire 
the  Old  Testament  prophets  to  speak  the  word 
of  the  Lord  regarding  the  way  of  righteousness 
whereby,  as  the  prophets  held,  the  prosperity 
of  Israel  was  to  be  restored.  Only  this  same 
lost  political  ideal,  and  this  resulting  discovery 
of  the  prophetic  theory  of  the  divine  govern- 
ment of  human  affairs,  could  lead  over  to  that 
later  religious  interpretation  and  to  that  re- 

278 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

writing  of  the  whole  ancient  history  of  Israel, 
which  we  now  read  in  our  Old  Testament. 
Only  upon  the  same  basis  could  the  Messianic 
idea  come  to  be  defined ;  and  only  thus  could 
the  prophetic  doctrine  of  the  universal  future 
triumph  of  righteousness  come  to  be  formu- 
lated. And  so  through  an  historical  process, 
every  step  of  which  depended  upon  a  pathetic 
and  yet  glorious  loyalty  to  a  lost  national 
cause,  the  ideals  in  question  were  at  once 
universalized  and  intensified  until,  through 
Israel,  all  the  nations  of  Christendom  have 
been  blessed.  In  consequence,  to-day,  in 
speaking  of  its  own  hopes  of  the  salvation  of 
mankind,  and  in  describing  its  coming  king- 
dom of  heaven,  Christianity  still  uses  the  fa- 
miliar terms :  Zion,  the  throne  of  David, 
Jerusalem, — terms  whose  original  application 
was  to  places  and  to  persons  first  made  notable 
in  their  own  time  merely  by  reason  of  the  petty 
tribal  feuds  of  an  obscure  province.  Thus 
loyalty,  steadfast  and  yet  developing  through 
centuries,  gradually  transformed  what  were 
once  seemingly  insignificant   matters  of  local 

279 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

politics   into  the   most  sacred  concerns  of  a 
world  religion. 

Loyalty  to  lost  causes  is,  then,  not  only  a 
possible  thing,  but  one  of  the  most  potent 
influences  of  human  history.  In  such  cases, 
the  cause  comes  to  be  idealized  through  its 
very  failure  to  win  temporary  and  visible  suc- 
cess. The  result  for  loyalty  may  be  vast.  I 
need  not  remind  you  that  the  early  Christian 
church  itself  was  at  first  founded  directly  upon 
a  loyalty  to  its  own  lost  cause,  — a  cause  which 
it  viewed  as  heavenly  just  because  here  on 
earth  the  enemies  seemed  to  have  triumphed, 
and  because  the  Master  had  departed  from 
human  vision.  The  whole  history  of  Chris- 
tianity is  therefore  one  long  lesson  as  to  how 
a  cause  may  be  idealized  through  apparent 
defeat,  and  how  even  thereby  loyalty  may  be 
taught  to  generation  after  generation  of  men, 
and  may  develop  into  endlessly  new  forms, 
and  so  may  appeal  to  peoples  to  whom  the 
cause  in  question  was  originally  wholly  strange. 
This  history  shows  us  how  such  a  teaching 
and  such  an  evolution  of  an  idea  may  be  fur- 

280 


TRAINING   FOR  LOYALTY 

thered  by  what  seems  at  first  most  likely  to 
discourage  loyalty,  that  is,  by  loss,  by  sorrow, 
by  worldly  defeat. 

Loyalty  to  a  lost  cause,  whatever  the  grade  of 
dignity  of  the  cause,  depends  in  part,  of  course, 
upon  the  same  motives  which  the  simpler  and 
more  direct  forms  of  loyalty  employ. 

But  when  a  cause  is  lost  in  the  visible  world, 
and  when,  nevertheless,  it  survives  in  the 
hearts  of  its  faithful  followers,  one  sees  more 
clearly  than  ever  that  its  appeal  is  no  longer 
to  be  fully  met  by  any  possible  present  deed. 
Whatever  one  can  just  now  do  for  the  cause  is 
thus  indeed  seen  to  be  inadequate.  All  the 
more,  in  consequence,  does  this  cause  demand 
that  its  followers  should  plan  and  work  for 
the  far-off  future,  for  whole  ages  and  aeons  of 
time ;  should  prepare  the  way  for  their  Lord, 
the  cause,  and  make  his  paths  straight.  Ac- 
tivity becomes  thus  all  the  more  strenuous, 
just  because  its  consequences  are  viewed  as 
so  far-reaching  and  stupendous.  Man's  ex- 
tremity is  loyalty's  opportunity.  The  present 
may  seem  dark.     All  the  greater  the  work 

281 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

yet  to  be  done.  The  distant  future  must  be 
conquered.  How  vast  the  undertaking,  — how 
vast,  but  therefore  how  inspiring ! 

All  this  larger  and  broader  devotion  of  those 
loyal  to  a  lost  cause  is  colored  and  illuminated 
by  strong  emotion.  Sorrow  over  what  has 
been  lost  pierces  deep  into  the  hearts  of  the 
faithful.  So  much  the  more  are  these  hearts 
stirred  to  pour  out  their  devotion.  Mean- 
while, the  glamour  of  memory  is  over  the  past. 
Whatever  was  commonplace  about  the  former 
visible  fortunes  of  the  lost  cause  is  now  for- 
gotten. For  the  memory  of  those  who  sorrow 
over  loss  is,  as  we  all  know,  fond  of  precious 
myths,  and  views  these  myths  as  a  form  in 
which  truth  appears.  In  the  great  days  that 
have  passed  away  — in  the  days  before  the 
cause  suffered  defeat  — there  was  indeed 
tragedy;  but  there  was  glory.  Legend,  often 
truer,  —  yes,  as  Aristotle  said  of  poetry,  more 
philosophical  than  history, — thus  reads  into  that 
past  not  what  the  lost  cause  literally  was,  but 
what  it  meant  to  be.  Its  body  is  dead.  But 
it  has  risen  again.     The  imagination,  chastened 

282 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

by  all  this  grief,  stirred  by  all  this  deep  need, 
not  only  reforms  the  story  of  the  past,  but 
builds  wonderful  visions  of  what  is  yet  to  be. 
Loyalty  for  the  lost  cause  is  thus  attended 
by  two  comrades,  grief  and  imagination. 
Yet  loyalty,  always  strenuous  and  active,  is 
not  enervated  by  these  deep  emotions,  nor  yet 
confused  by  the  wealth  of  these  visions;  but 
rather  devotes  itself  to  resolving  upon  what 
shall  be.  Grief  it  therefore  transforms  into 
a  stimulating  sense  of  need.  If  we  have  lost, 
then  let  us  find.  Loyalty  also  directs  its  deeds 
by  the  visions  that  imagination  furnishes; 
and  meanwhile  it  demands  in  turn  that  the 
imagination  shall  supply  it  with  visions  that 
can  be  translated  into  deeds.  When  it  hears 
from  the  imagination  the  story  of  the  coming 
triumph,  it  does  not  become  passive.  Rather 
does  it  say:  Watch,  for  ye  know  not  the  day 
or  the  hour  when  the  triumph  of  the  cause  is 
to  come. 

Hora  novissima 

Tempora  pessima 

Sunt,  vigilemus.    • 

283 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

This  wonderful  awakening  from  the  pros- 
tration of  grief  to  the  stern  but  fascinating  re- 
solve to  live  and  to  be  active  for  the  lost  cause, 
this  freeing  of  the  imagination  through  the 
very  agony  of  missing  the  dear  presence  in  the 
visible  world,  and  this  complete  control  both 
of  such  passion  and  of  such  imagination 
through  the  will  to  make  all  things  work  to- 
gether for  the  good  of  the  cause,  —  all  this  is 
the  peculiar  privilege  of  those  who  are  loyal 
to  a  cause  which  the  world  regards  as  lost, 
and  which  the  faithful  view  as  ascended  into 
a  higher  realm,  certain  to  come  again  in  re- 
newed might  and  beauty.  Thus  may  grief 
minister  to  loyalty. 

And  I  may  add,  as  an  obvious  truth  of  hu- 
man nature,  that  loyalty  is  never  raised  to  its 
highest  levels  without  such  grief.  For  what 
one  learns  from  experience  of  grief  over  loss 
is  precisely  the  true  link  between  loyalty  as 
a  moral  attitude,  and  whatever  is  eternally 
valuable  in  religion.  One  begins,  when  one 
serves  the  lost  causes,  to  discover  that,  in  some 
sense,  one  ought  to  devote  one's  highest  loy- 

284 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

alty  precisely  to  the  causes  that  are  too  good 
to  be  visibly  realized  at  any  one  moment  of  this 
poor  wretched  fleeting  time  world  in  which 
we  see  and  touch  and  find  mere  things,  mere 
sensations,  mere  feelings  of  the  moment. 
Loyalty  wants  the  cause  in  its  unity ;  it  seeks, 
therefore,  something  essentially  superhuman. 
And  therefore,  as  you  see,  loyalty  is  linked  with 
religion.  In  its  highest  reaches  it  always  is, 
therefore,  the  service  of  a  cause  that  is  just 
now  lost  — and  lost  because  the  mere  now  is 
too  poor  a  vehicle  for  the  presentation  of  that 
ideal  unity  of  life  of  which  every  form  of  loyalty 
is  in  quest.  Loyalty  to  loyalty,  that  cause  of 
causes  upon  which  I  have  so  much  insisted 
in  the  foregoing,  is  indeed  just  now  in  far  too 
many  ways  a  lost  cause  amongst  men.  But 
that  is  the  fault  of  the  men,  not  of  the  cause. 
Let  us  rejoice  that  we  can  serve  a  cause  of 
which  the  world,  as  it  is,  is  not  yet  worthy. 

The  history  of  the  lost  causes  is  instructive, 
however,  not  only  as  showing  us  a  new  aspect 
of  the  value  of  loyalty,  namely,  what  I  have 
just  called  the  link  between  loyalty  and  religion, 

285 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

but  also  as  showing  us  something  of  the  way 
in  which  grief,  and  imagination,  and  the  stir- 
ring of  our  whole  human  nature  to  its  very 
depths,  through  loss  and  through  defeat,  have 
served  in  the  past  as  means  of  training  in  loyalty. 
This  school  of  adversity  has  often  been  a  hard 
one.  But  the  loyalty  that  has  been  trained 
in  this  school  has  produced  for  us  some  of 
humanity's  most  precious  spiritual  treasures. 
Thus,  then,  through  personal  leaders  and 
through  suffering,  loyalty  learns  to  idealize 
its  cause. 

VI 

What  is  the  lesson  of  all  the  foregoing  when 
we  ask :  How  shall  we  ourselves  seek  training 
in  loyalty? 

The  first  answer  is  obvious :  Whatever  our 
cause,  we  need  personal  leaders.  And  how 
shall  we  be  surest  of  finding  such  personal 
leaders?  Shall  we  look  exclusively  to  those 
who  are  fellow- servants  of  our  own  chosen 
special  causes  ?  We  all  do  this.  Yet  this  is 
often  not  enough.     Familiarity  and  personal 

286 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

misunderstandings  often  interfere  with  the 
guidance  that  our  fellow-servants  give  us. 
We  need  the  wider  outlook.  Close  friendships 
are  amongst  the  most  powerful  supports  of 
loyalty.  Yet  when  people  confine  themselves 
to  regarding  their  close  friends  as  their  leaders 
in  loyalty,  they  often  become  narrow  and  for- 
get the  cause  of  universal  loyalty.  Much  of 
the  art  of  loyalty,  consequently,  depends  upon 
training  yourself  to  observe  the  loyal  who  are 
all  about  you,  however  remote  their  cause  is 
from  yours,  however  humble  their  lives.  It  is 
well  also,  whenever  you  have  to  fight,  to  learn 
the  art  of  honoring  your  opponent's  loyalty, 
even  if  you  learn  of  it  mainly  through  feeling 
the  weight  and  the  sharpness  of  his  sword. 
"It  is  a  deep  cut;  but  a  loyal  enemy  was  he 
who  could  give  it  to  me"  — to  think  in  such 
terms  is  to  lighten  the  gloom  of  conflict  with 
what  may  sometimes  be  more  precious  than  a 
transient  victory;  for  at  such  moments  of 
honoring  the  loyally  dangerous  enemy,  we 
begin  to  learn  that  all  the  loyal  are  in  spirit 
serving,  however  unwittingly,  the  same  uni- 

287 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

versal  cause.  To  be  sure,  when  men  have 
once  sufficiently  learned  that  lesson,  they  cease 
to  fight.  But  while  fighting  lasts,  if  you  cannot 
love  your  enemy,  it  is  a  beautiful  thing  to  be 
able  to  enjoy  the  sight  of  his  loyalty. 

But  men  have  not  to  fight  one  another  in 
order  to  display  loyalty.  Open  your  eyes,  then, 
to  observe  better  the  loyalty  of  the  peaceful, 
as  well  as  of  the  warriors.  Consider  especially 
the  loyalty  of  the  obscure,  of  the  humble,  of 
your  near  neighbors,  of  the  strangers  who  by 
chance  come  under  your  notice.  For  such 
exemplars  of  loyalty  you  always  have.  Make 
them  your  leaders.  Regard  every  loyal  man 
as  your  leader  in  the  service  of  the  cause  of 
universal  loyalty. 

VII 

But  our  review  of  the  history  of  loyalty 
taught  us  another  lesson.  We  need  not  only 
leaders.  We  need  to  idealize  our  causes ; 
that  is,  to  see  in  them  whatever  most  serves 
to  link  them  to  the  cause  of  universal  loyalty. 

288 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

And  the  procedure  whereby  our  causes  are  to 
be  idealized  is  one  involving  a  range  of  possible 
experiences  and  activities  far  too  vast  to  be 
adequately  surveyed  in  our  present  discussion. 
Here  belong  all  those  practically  valuable  rela- 
tions between  loyalty  and  art,  and  between 
loyalty  and  religion,  which  the  history  of  man- 
kind illustrates  and  which  we  can  use  in  our 
own  training  for  loyalty.  Art  supports  loyalty 
whenever  it  associates  our  cause  with  beautiful 
objects,  whenever  it  sets  before  us  the  symbols 
of  our  cause  in  any  worthy  expression,  and 
whenever,  again,  by  showing  us  any  form 
of  the  beautiful,  it  portrays  to  us  that  very 
sort  of  learning  and  unity  that  loyalty  cease- 
lessly endeavors  to  bring  into  human  life. 
Thus  viewed,  art  may  be  a  teacher  of  loyalty. 
To  say  this  is  in  no  wise  to  prejudge  the  fa- 
mous question  regarding  the  main  purpose  of 
art,  and  the  relation  of  this  purpose  of  art  to 
the  moral  life.  I  am  attempting  here  no  theory 
of  art.  But  it  belongs  to  our  present  province 
merely  to  insist  that  part  of  our  education  in 
loyalty  is  to  be  won  through  whatever  love  of 

u  289 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

beauty  and  whatever  knowledge  of  the  beau- 
tiful we  possess.  The  monuments  of  any  cause 
that  possesses  monuments  should  associate 
our  love  of  this  cause  with  our  love  for  beauty. 
Our  personal  causes,  if  they  are  worthy  at  all, 
need  beautiful  symbols  to  express  to  us  their 
preciousness.  Whatever  is  beautiful  appears 
to  us  to  embody  harmonious  relations.  And 
the  practical  search  for  harmony  of  life  consti- 
tutes loyalty.  And  thus  training  for  loyalty 
includes  the  knowledge  of  the  beautiful. 

Still  more  universal  in  its  efficacy  as  an  ideal- 
izer  of  private  and  personal  causes  is  religion. 
In  how  far  a  genuinely  religious  experience 
results  from  loyalty,  and  in  how  far  loyalty 
bears  witness  to  any  religiously  significant 
truth,  we  have  hereafter  to  see.  Our  closing 
lectures  will  deal  with  the  bearing  of  loyalty 
upon  religion.  But  we  have  here  to  mention, 
in  passing,  the  converse  relation ;  namely,  the 
influence  of  religion  upon  loyalty.  We  have 
to  point  out  how  large  a  part  of  the  function 
of  religion  in  human  affairs  consists  in  the 
idealizing  of  our  loyalties,  by  linking  our  causes, 

290 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

whatever  they  are,  to  a  world  which  seems  to 
us  to  be  superhuman. 


VIII 

Art  and  religion,  however,  are  not  our  only 
means  for  teaching  ourselves  to  view  our 
personal  causes  as  linked  with  universal  hu- 
man interests,  and  with  an  unseen  superhu- 
man world.  Sorrow,  defeat,  disappointment, 
failure,  whenever  these  result  from  our  efforts 
to  serve  a  cause,  may  all  be  used  to  teach  us 
the  same  lesson.  How  such  lessons  have  been 
taught  to  humanity  at  large,  the  history  of  those 
lost  causes  which  have  been,  even  because  of 
the  loss,  transformed  into  causes  of  permanent 
and  world-wide  importance,  has  now  shown  us. 
This  lesson  of  the  history  of  the  lost  causes  is, 
however,  one  that  has  deep  importance  for 
our  individual  training.  We  do  not  always 
read  this  lesson  aright.  To  keep  our  loyalty 
steadfast  through  defeat  is  something  that  we 
often  view  as  a  sort  of  extra  strain  upon  loyalty, 
—  the  overcoming  of  a  painful  hindrance  to 

291 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

loyalty.  We  ought  not  so  to  view  the  matter. 
Defeat  and  sorrow,  when  they  are  incurred  in 
the  service  of  a  cause,  ought  rather  to  be  a 
positive  aid  to  loyalty.  If  we  rightly  view 
them,  they  will  prove  to  be  such  an  aid.  For 
they  enable  us  to  see  whether  we  have  really 
given  ourselves  to  the  cause,  or  whether  what 
we  took  for  loyalty  was  a  mere  flare  of  sanguine 
emotion.  When  sorrow  over  a  defeat  in  the 
service  of  our  cause  reverberates  all  through 
us,  it  can  be  made  to  reveal  whatever  loyalty 
we  have.  Let  us  turn  our  attention  to  this 
revelation,  even  while  we  suffer.  We  shall 
then  know  for  what  we  have  been  living.  And 
whoever,  once  deliberately  dwelling  upon  his 
cause  at  a  moment  of  defeat,  does  not  find 
the  cause  dearer  to  him  because  of  his  grief, 
has  indeed  yet  to  learn  what  loyalty  is.  The 
cause,  furthermore,  when  viewed  in  the  light 
of  our  sorrow  over  our  loss  of  its  present  for- 
tunes, at  once  tends  to  become  idealized, — 
as  the  lost  throne  of  David  was  idealized  by 
Israel,  and  as  the  departed  Master's  cause  was 
idealized  by  the  early  church. 

292 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

The  disciples,  in  the  well-known  story,  say 
concerning  their  lost  Master  to  the  stranger 
whom  they  meet  on  the  lonely  road  to  Emmaus  : 
"We  had  trusted  that  it  was  he  who  should 
have  redeemed  Israel."  But  soon  after  "their 
eyes  were  opened,  and  they  knew  him,  and  he 
vanished  out  of  their  sight."  Amongst  all 
the  legends  of  the  risen  Lord,  this  one  most 
completely  expresses  the  spirit  of  that  loyalty 
which,  triumphing  even  through  defeat,  win- 
ning the  spirit  even  through  the  loss  of  a  visible 
presence,  was  thereafter  to  conquer  its  world. 

Now,  the  lesson  of  such  experiences,  as  his- 
tory records  them,  relates  not  merely  to  great 
movements  and  to  mankind  at  large.  It  is 
a  personal  lesson.  It  concerns  each  one  of 
us.  I  repeat :  View  your  sorrow  by  itself,  and 
it  is  a  blind  and  hopeless  fact;  view  your 
cause  in  the  light  of  your  sorrow,  and  the  cause 
becomes  transfigured.  For  you  learn  hereby 
that  it  was  not  this  or  that  fortune,  nor  even 
this  or  that  human  life  which  constituted  your 
cause.  There  was  from  the  beginning,  about 
your  cause,  something  that  to  human  vision 

293 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

seems  superpersonal,  unearthly  as  well  as 
earthly.  Now  the  memory  of  whatever  is  lost 
about  your  cause  is  peculiarly  adapted  to  bring 
to  your  consciousness  what  this  superpersonal 
element  has  been.  I  have  already  mentioned 
the  merely  psychological  aspects  of  the  pro- 
cess that,  in  such  cases,  goes  on.  The  gla- 
mour which  memory  throws  about  the  past, 
the  awakening  of  the  imagination  when  some 
visible  presence  is  removed,  the  stimulating 
reaction  from  the  first  stroke  of  sorrow  when- 
ever we  are  able  once  more  to  think  of  our  cause 
itself,  the  transformation  of  our  own  ideas 
about  the  cause,  by  virtue  of  the  very  fact  that, 
since  our  loss  has  so  changed  life,  the  cause 
can  no  longer  be  served  in  the  old  way,  and 
must  be  the  object  of  new  efforts,  and  so  of 
some  new  form  of  devotion,—  all  these  are  the 
idealizing  motives  which  are  present  when 
defeat  comes.  I  insist,  —  human  loyalty  can 
never  be  perfected  without  such  sorrow.  Re- 
gard defeat  and  bereavement,  therefore,  as 
loyalty's  opportunity.  Use  them  deliberately 
as  means  for  idealizing  the  cause,  and  so  far 

294 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

bringing  your  personal  cause  into  closer  touch 
with  the  cause  of  universal  loyalty. 

The  most  familiar  of  all  those  blows  of  for- 
tune which  seem  to  us,  for  the  moment,  to 
make  our  personal  cause  a  lost  cause,  is  death, 
when  it  comes  to  those  with  whom  our  per- 
sonal cause  has  so  far  been  bound  up.  And 
yet  what  motive  in  human  life  has  done  more 
to  idealize  the  causes  of  individuals  than  death 
has  done  ?  Death,  viewed  as  a  mere  fact  of 
human  experience,  and  as  a  merely  psychologi- 
cal influence,  has  been  one  of  the  greatest 
idealizers  of  human  life.  The  memory  of  the 
dead  idealizes  whatever  interest  the  living  have 
in  former  days  shared  with  the  departed. 
Reverence  for  the  dead  dignifies  the  effort  to 
carry  on  the  work  that  they  began,  or  that,  if 
they  died  in  childhood,  our  fond  desire  would 
have  had  them  live  to  do.  From  the  beginning 
a  great  portion  of  the  religious  imagination  of 
mankind  has  centred  about  the  fact  of  death. 
And  the  same  motive  works  to-day  in  the 
minds  of  all  the  loyal,  whatever  their  faith. 

Idealize   your   cause.     This   has   been   our 

295 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

maxim  for  the  present  aspect  of  our  personal 
training  in  loyalty.  I  have  offered  merely  some 
hints  as  to  how  this  maxim  may  be  carried  into 
effect.  How  science  can  join  with  art  and  with 
religion,  how  joyous  friendly  intercourse  can 
in  its  own  place  cooperate  with  our  experiences 
of  sorrow  to  teach  us  the  lessons  of  idealizing 
our  common  causes, —  all  this  I  can  only  indi- 
cate. 

And  thus  we  have  before  us  two  of  the 
methods  whereby  individual  loyalty  is  trained. 
The  deliberate  fixing  of  our  attention  upon  the 
doings  of  loyal  people,  the  deliberate  use  of 
those  methods  of  human  nature  which  tend 
to  idealize  our  cause, — these  are  means  for 
training  in  loyalty. 

Yet  one  method  remains,  —  it  is  the  most 
commonplace,  yet  often  the  hardest  of  all. 
Loyalty  means  giving  the  Self  to  the  Cause. 
And  the  art  of  giving  is  learned  by  giving. 
Strain,  endurance,  sacrifice,  toil, — the  dear 
pangs  of  labor  at  the  moments  when  perhaps 
defeat  and  grief  most  seem  ready  to  crush  our 
powers,  and  when  only  the  very  vehemence  of 

296 


TRAINING   FOR   LOYALTY 

labor  itself  saves  us  from  utter  despair, — these 
are  the  things  that  most  teach  us  what  loyalty 
really  is.  I  need  not  enlarge  here  upon  an 
ancient  and  constantly  repeated  lesson  of  life, 
—  a  lesson  which  is  known  to  all  of  you.  The 
partisans  of  war  often  glorify  war  as  a  mor- 
alizer  of  humanity,  because,  as  they  say, 
only  the  greatest  strains  and  dangers  can  teach 
men  true  loyalty.  I  do  not  think  that  war  is 
needed  for  such  lessons.  The  loyalty  of  the 
most  peaceful  enables  us  all  to  experience, 
sooner  or  later,  what  it  means  to  give,  whatever 
it  was  in  our  power  to  give,  for  the  cause,  and 
then  to  see  our  cause  take  its  place,  to  human 
vision,  amongst  the  lost  causes.  When  such 
experiences  come,  let  us  face  them  without 
hesitation.  For  all  these  things  together, — 
our  personal  friends  who  inspire  us  to  the 
service  of  our  own  causes,  the  hosts  of  the  loyal 
whom  we  know  so  little,  but  who  constitute 
the  invisible  church  of  those  who  live  in  the 
spirit,  the  griefs  that  teach  us  the  glory  of  what 
our  human  vision  has  lost  from  its  field,  the 
imagination  that  throws  over  all  the  range  of 

297 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

human  life  its  idealizing  light,  the  labors  that 
leave  us  breathless,  the  crushing  defeats  that 
test  our  devotion,  — well,  these,  these  are  all 
only  the  means  and  the  ministers  whereby  we 
are  taught  to  enter  the  realm  of  spiritual  truth. 


208 


VII 

LOYALTY,   TRUTH,   AND  REALITY 


LECTURE  VII 

LOYALTY,   TRUTH,  AND   REALITY 

IN  closing  my  last  lecture  I  said  that  what-\ 
ever  trains  us  in  the  arts  of  loyalty  enables^ 
us  to  enter  into  a  world  of  spiritual  truth. 
These  words  were  intended  to  indicate  that 
the  loyal  life  has  another  aspect  than  the  one 
hitherto  most  emphasized  in  these  lectures. 
Our  foregoing  account  has  been  deliberately 
one-sided.  We  have  been  discussing  the  moral 
life  as  if  one  could  define  a  plan  of  conduct 
without  implying  more  about  man's  place  in 
the  real  universe  than  we  have  yet  made  ex- 
plicit in  these  lectures.  Hence  our  discussion, 
so  far,  is  open  to  obvious  objections. 

For,  in  talking  about  the  good  of  loyalty, 
we  have  indeed  appealed  to  human  experience 
to  show  us  wherein  that  good  consists.  But 
our  very  appeal  also  showed  us  that  loyalty  is 
good  for  a  man  precisely  because  he  believes 
that  his  cause  itself,  even  apart  from  his  ser- 

301 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

vice,  is  good,  and  that  both  his  cause  and  its 
goodness  are  realities,  founded  in  facts  which 
far  transcend  his  individual  life  and  his  per- 
sonal experience.  Now,  one  may  well  doubt 
whether  this  belief  of  a  loyal  man  is,  in  any 
individual  case,  a  well-founded  belief.  And 
if  it  is  not  well  founded,  one  may  well  ques- 
tion whether  the  loyal  man's  good  is  not, 
after  all,  an  illusory  good,  which  will  vanish 
from  his  experience  as  soon  as  he  becomes 
enlightened.  Since  any  instance  of  loyalty 
is  subject  to  this  sceptical  inquiry,  one  may 
doubt  whether  even  what  we  have  called  the 
supreme  cause,  that  of  loyalty  to  loyalty,  is 
a  good  cause.  For  any  or  all  loyalties  may  be 
founded  in  illusion,  and  then  it  would  be  an 
illusion  that  the  fostering  of  loyalty  amongst 
men  is  a  finally  worthy  undertaking. 


Objections  of  this  sort  are  best  stated  by 
those  to  whom  they  actually  occur  as  serious 
difficulties  regarding  the  discussions  contained 
in  the  foregoing  lectures.     A  dear  friend  of 

302 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

mine,  without  receiving  any  instigation  from 
me  to  help  me  by  such  an  act,  has  so  aptly 
summed  up  the  objections  here  in  question, 
that  I  can  best  show  you  precisely  where  we  now 
stand  by  reading  to  you  a  portion  of  a  letter 
which  he  has  written  to  me,  after  hearing  the 
first  portion  of  my  account  of  the  good  of 
loyalty. 

"'Loyalty  to  loyalty,"'  writes  my  friend, 
"doesn't  seem  ultimate.  Is  it  not  loyalty  to 
all  objects  of  true  loyalty  that  is  our  ultimate 
duty?  The  object,  not  the  relation,  — the 
universe  and  the  devotion  to  it,  not  the  devo- 
tion alone,  is  the  object  of  our  ultimate  devo- 
tion. ...  Is  it  not  the  glory  of  this  goal  that 
lends  dignity  to  all  loyal  search,  — our  own 
or  that  of  others  ?  It  is  because  of  this  goal 
that  we  cheer  on  all  to  pursue  it.  .  .  .  It  is 
because  of  what  we  believe  about  the  end  of 
the  various  loyalties  that  we  are  so  glad  of  all 
the  loyalties  which  make  it  possible  to  attain 
that  end.  The  port  gives  value  to  the  courses 
steering  for  it.  .  .  .  Except  for  our  knowl- 
edge of  the  value  of  their  destination,  and  of 

303 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

all  life  lived  in  quest  of  that  destination,  should 
we  be  anxious  to  urge  all  seekers  along  their 
courses  ?  .  .  .  Loyalty  is  a  relation.  .  .  .  Can 
we  be  loyal  to  anything,  ultimately,  except 
the  universe  which  is  the  object  of  all  love 
and  all  knowledge?" 

So  far  my  friend's  statement  of  his  difficulty. 
As  you  will  see,  from  these  two  closing  lec- 
tures of  my  course  which  still  remain,  I  cor- 
dially share  my  friend's  objection  to  the 
definition  of  loyalty  so  far  insisted  upon  in 
these  lectures.  Our  definition  of  loyalty,  and 
of  its  relation  to  the  ultimate  good  which  the 
loyal  are  seeking,  has  so  far  been  inadequate. 
But,  as  I  told  you  in  the  opening  lecture,  we 
deliberately  began  with  an  inadequate  defi- 
nition of  the  nature  of  loyalty.  We  were 
obliged  to  do  so.  I  expressly  said  this  in  my 
opening  statement.  Why  we  were  obliged 
to  do  so,  and  why,  thus  far  in  these  lectures, 
we  have  confined  ourselves  to  developing  and 
to  illustrating  the  consequences  of  this  im- 
perfect definition  of  loyalty,  our  closing  lec- 
tures will  of  themselves,  I  hope,  make  clear. 

304 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

A  similar  difficulty  can  be  urged  against  any 
mere  moralism,  that  is,  against  any  purely 
ethical  theory  of  the  moral  life.  One  wants 
a  doctrine  of  the  real  world,  or  a  religion,  to 
help  out  one's  ethics.  For,  as  I  have  replied 
to  my  friend,  morality,  viewed  by  itself,  has 
a  character  that  can  well  be  suggested  by  the 
parable  of  the  talents.  The  moral  life,  re- 
garded simply  as  the  moral  life,  is  the  ser- 
vice of  a  master  who  seems,  to  those  who 
serve  him,  to  have  gone  away  into  a  far 
country.  His  servants  have  faith  in  him,  but 
the  service  of  his  cause  always  has,  for  the 
moral,  a  certain  mystery  about  it.  They 
can  indeed  become  sure,  apart  from  any  solu- 
tion of  this  mystery,  that  their  own  supreme 
personal  good  lies  in  serving  their  lord.  For 
not  otherwise  can  they  find  even  the  relative 
peace  that  lies  in  a  service  of  duty.  But 
those  who  serve  are  not  thus  altogether 
secured  against  a  pessimism  regarding  the 
whole  outcome  of  human  endeavor.  For  if 
loyalty  is  indeed  our  best,  may  not  even  this 
best  itself  be  a  failure? 

x  305 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

Or,  to  use  further  the  similitude  of  the 
parable  of  the  talents :  It  may  be  indeed  our 
supreme  good  to  serve  the  master  who  has 
gone  into  the  far  country.  Yet  we  do  not 
merely  want  to  serve  him ;  we  want,  like  Job, 
to  meet  him  face  to  face.  Suppose  that  we 
should  discover  the  master  to  be  indeed  un- 
worthy or  a  phantom  or  a  deceiver,  would 
even  this,  our  best  good,  the  service  of  his 
cause,  seem  permanently  valuable  ?  Should 
we  not  say,  some  day :  To  serve  hjm  was  our 
best  chance  of  life;  but  after  all  even  that 
service  was  vanity. 

In  any  case,  our  loyalty  implies  a  faith  in 
the  master,  — an  assurance  that  life,  at  its  best, 
is  indeed  worth  while.  Our  philosophy  of 
loyalty  must  therefore  include  an  attempt 
to  see  the  master  of  life  himself,  and  to  find 
out  whether  in  truth  he  is,  what  our  loyalty 
implies  that  he  is,  a  master  worth  serving. 

To  sum  up:  So  far  we  have  defined  the 
moral  life  as  loyalty,  and  have  shown  why 
the  moral  life  is  for  us  men  the  best  life. 
But   now   we   want   to   know   what   truth   is 

306 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

behind  and  beneath  the  moral  life.  With 
my  friendly  correspondent,  we  want  to  see 
the  relation  of  loyalty  to  the  real  universe. 


II 

What  must  be  true  about  the  universe  if 
even  loyalty  itself  is  a  genuine  good,  and  not 
a  merely  inevitable  human  illusion  ? 

Well,  loyalty  is  a  service  of  causes.  A 
cause,  if  it  really  is  what  our  definition  re- 
quires, links  various  human  lives  into  the 
unity  of  one  life.  Therefore,  if  loyalty  has 
any  basis  in  truth,  human  lives  can  be  linked 
in  some  genuine  spiritual  unity.  Is  such 
unity  a  fact,  or  is  our  belief  in  our  causes  a 
mere  point  of  view,  a  pathetic  fallacy  ?  Surely, 
if  any  man,  however  loyal,  discovers  that  his 
cause  is  a  dream,  and  that  men  remain  as 
a  fact  sundered  beings,  not  really  linked  by 
genuine  spiritual  ties,  how  can  that  man  re- 
main loyal  ?  Perhaps  his  supreme  good  in- 
deed lies  in  believing  that  such  unities  are 
real.     But  if  this  belief  turns  out  to  be  an 

307 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

illusion,  and  if  a  man  detects  the  illusion,  can 
he  any  longer  get  the  good  out  of  loyalty  ? 

And  as  for  even  this  personal  good  that  is 
to  be  got  out  of  loyalty,  we  have  all  along 
seen  that  such  good  comes  to  a  loyal  man's 
mind  in  a  very  paradoxical  way.  A  loyal 
man  gets  good,  but  since  he  gets  it  by  believ- 
ing that  his  cause  has  a  real  existence  outside 
of  his  private  self,  and  is  of  itself  a  good 
thing,  he  gets  the  fascination  of  loyalty  not 
as  a  private  delight  of  his  own,  but  as  a  ful- 
filment of  himself  through  self-surrender  to 
an  externally  existing  good, — through  a  will- 
ing abandonment  of  the  seeking  of  his  own 
delight.  And  so  the  loyal  man's  good  is 
essentially  an  anticipation  of  a  good  that  he 
regards  as  not  his  own,  but  as  existent  in  the 
cause.  The  cause,  however,  is  itself  no  one 
fellow-man,  and  no  mere  collection  of  fellow- 
men.  It  is  a  family,  a  country,  a  church,  or 
is  such  a  rational  union  of  many  human  minds 
and  wills  as  we  have  in  mind  when  we  speak 
of  a  science  or  an  art.  Now,  can  such  causes 
contain  any  good  which  is  not  simply  a  col- 


LOYALTY,   TRUTH,   AND   REALITY 

lection  of  separate  human  experiences  of 
pleasure  or  of  satisfaction  ?  Thus,  then,  both 
the  reality  and  the  good  of  a  loyal  man's 
cause  must  be  objects  of  the  loyal  man's 
belief  in  order  that  he  should  be  able  to  get 
the  experience  of  loyalty.  And  if  his  loyalty 
is  indeed  well  founded,  there  must  be  unities 
of  spiritual  life  in  the  universe  such  that  no 
one  man  ever,  by  himself,  experiences  these 
unities  as  facts  of  his  own  consciousness. 
And  these  higher  unities  of  life  must  possess 
a  degree  and  a  type  of  goodness, —  a  genuine 
value,  such  that  no  one  man,  and  no  mere 
collection  of  men,  can  ever  exhaustively  ex- 
perience this  goodness,  or  become  personally 
possessed  of  this  value. 

How  paradoxical  a  world,  then,  must  the 
real  world  be,  if  the  faith  of  the  loyal  is  indeed 
well  founded  !  A  spiritual  unity  of  life,  which 
transcends  the  individual  experience  of  any 
man,  must  be  real.  For  loyalty,  as  we  have 
seen,  is  a  service  of  causes  that,  from  the 
human  point  of  view,  appear  superpersonal. 
Loyalty  holds  these  unities  to  be  good.     If 

309 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

loyalty  is  right,  the  real  goodness  of  these 
causes  is  never  completely  manifested  to  any 
one  man,  or  to  any  mere  collection  of  men. 
Such  goodness,  then,  if  completely  experienced 
at  all,  must  be  experienced  upon  some  higher 
level  of  consciousness  than  any  one  human 
being  ever  reaches,  ft  If  loyalty  is  right,  social 
causes,  social  organizations,  friendships,  fam- 
ilies, countries,  yes,  humanity,  as  you  see, 
must  have  the  sort  of  unity  of  consciousness 
which  individual  human  persons  fragmen- 
tarily  get,  but  must  have  this  unity  upon  a 
higher  level  than  that  of  our  ordinary  human 
individuality^ 

Some  such  view,  I  say,  must  be  held  if  we 
t   are  to  regard  loyalty  as  in  the  end  anything 
.  ,Y>  1    more    than    a    convenient    illusion.     Loyalty 
VV  has  its  metaphysical  aspect.     It  is  an  effort  to 

conceive  human  life  in  an  essentially  super- 
human way,  to  view  our  social  organizations 
as  actual  personal  unities  of  consciousness, 
unities  wherein  there  exists  an  actual  experi- 
ence of  that  good  which,  in  our  loyalty,  we 
only  partially  apprehend.      If  the  loyalty  of 

310 


LOYALTY,   TRUTH,   AND   REALITY 

the  lovers  is  indeed  well  founded  in  fact,  then 
they,  as  separate  individuals,  do  not  constitute 
the  whole  truth.  Their  spiritual  union  also 
has  a  personal,  a  conscious  existence,  upon  a 
higher  than  human  level.  An  analogous  unity 
of  consciousness,  an  unity  superhuman  in 
grade,  but  intimately  bound  up  with,  and  in- 
clusive of,  our  apparently  separate  personali- 
ties, must  exist,  if  loyalty  is  well  founded, 
wherever  a  real  cause  wins  the  true  devotion  of 
ourselves.  Grant  such  an  hypothesis,  and 
then  loyalty  becomes  no  pathetic  serving  of  a 
myth.  The  good  which  our  causes  possess, 
then,  also  becomes  a  concrete  fact  for  an 
experience  of  a  higher  than  human  level. 
That  union  of  self-sacrifice  with  self-assertion 
which  loyalty  expresses  becomes  a  conscious- 
ness of  our  genuine  relations  to  a  higher  social 
unity  of  consciousness  in  which  we  all  have 
our  being.  For  from  this  point  of  view  we 
are,  and  we  have  our  worth,  by  virtue  of  our 
relation  to  a  consciousness  of  a  type  superior 
to  the  human  type.  And  meanwhile  the  good 
of  our  loyalty  is  itself  a  perfectly  concrete  good, 

311 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

a  good  which  is  present  to  that  higher  experi- 
ence, wherein  our  cause  is  viewed  in  its  truth, 
as  a  genuine  unity  of  life.  And  because  of 
this  fact  we  can  straightforwardly  say:  We 
are  loyal  not  for  the  sake  of  the  good  that  we 
privately  get  out  of  loyalty,  but  for  the  sake 
of  the  good  that  the  cause  — this  higher  unity 
of  experience  — gets  out  of  this  loyalty.  Yet 
our  loyalty  gives  us  what  is,  after  all,  our 
supreme  good,  for  it  defines  our  true  position 
in  the  world  of  that  social  will  wherein  we  live 
and  move  and  have  our  being. 

I  doubt  not  that  such  a  view  of  human  life, 
—  such  an  assertion  that  the  social  will  is  a 
concrete  entity,  just  as  real  as  we  are,  and  of 
still  a  higher  grade  of  reality  than  ourselves,  — 
will  seem  to  many  of  you  mythical  enough. 
Yet  thus  to  view  the  unity  of  human  life  is,-l 
after  all,  a  common  tendency  of  the  loyal. 
That  fact  I  have  illustrated  in  every  lecture 
of  this  course.  That  such  a  view  need  not  be/ 
mythical,  that  truth  and  reality  can  be  con-  , 
ceived  only  in  such  terms  as  these,  that  our 
philosophy  of  loyalty  is  a  rational  part  of  a 

312 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

philosophy  which  must  view  the  whole  world 
as  one  unity  of  consciousness,  wherein  count- 
less lesser  unities  are  synthesized, — this  is  a 
general  philosophical  thesis  which  I  must  next 
briefly  expound  to  you. 

Ill 

My  exposition,  as  you  see,  must  be,  in  any 
case,  an  attempt  to  show  that  the  inevitable 
faith  of  the  loyal  —  their  faith  in  their  causes, 
and  in  the  real  goodness  of  their  causes  —  has 
truth,  and  since  I  must  thus,  in  any  case,  dis- 
course of  truth,  I  propose  briefly  to  show  you 
that  whoever  talks  of  any  sort  of  truth  what- 
ever, be  that  truth  moral  or  scientific,  the 
truth  of  common  sense  or  the  truth  of  a  phi- 
losophy, inevitably  implies,  in  all  his  asser- 
tions about  truth,  that  the  world  of  truth  of 
which  he  speaks  is  a  world  possessing  a 
rational  and  spiritual  unity,  is  a  conscious 
world  of  experience,  whose  type  of  conscious- 
ness is  higher  in  its  level  than  is  the  type  of 
our  human  minds,  but  whose  life  is  such  that 
our  life  belongs  as  part  to  this  living  whole. 

313 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

This  world  of  truth  is  the  one  that  you  must 
define,  so  I  insist,  if  you  are  to  regard  any 
proposition  whatever  as  true,  and  are  then 
to  tell,  in  a  reasonable  way,  what  you  mean 
by  the  truth  of  that  proposition. 

The  world  of  truth  is  therefore  essentially 
a  world  such  as  that  in  whose  reality  the  loyal 
believe  when  they  believe  their  cause  to  be 
real.  Moreover,  this  truth  world  has  a  good- 
ness about  it,  essentially  like  that  which  the 
loyal  attribute  to  their  causes.  Truth  seek- 
ing and  loyalty  are  therefore  essentially  the 
same  process  of  life  merely  viewed  in  two 
different  aspects.  Whoever  is  loyal  serves 
what  he  takes  to  be  a  truth,  namely,  his  cause. 
On  the  other  hand,  whoever  seeks  truth  for 
its  own  sake  fails  of  his  business  if  he  seeks 
it  merely  as  a  barren  abstraction,  that  has  no 
life  in  it.  If  a  truth  seeker  knows  his  busi- 
ness, he  is,  then,  in  the  sense  of  our  definition, 
serving  a  cause  which  unifies  our  human  life 
upon  some  higher  level  of  spiritual  being  than 
the  present  human  level.  He  is  therefore 
essentially  loyal.     Truth  seeking  is  a  moral 

314 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

activity ;  and  on  the  other  hand,  morality  is 
wholly  inadequate  unless  the  light  of  eternal 
truth  shines  upon  it. 

This,  I  say,  will  be  my  thesis.  Some  of 
you  will  call  it  very  mystical,  or  at  least  a 
very  fantastic  thesis.  It  is  not  so.  It  ought 
to  be  viewed  as  a  matter  of  plain  sense.  It  is, 
I  admit,  a  thesis  which  many  of  the  most  dis- 
tinguished amongst  my  colleagues,  who  are 
philosophers,  nowadays  view  sometimes  with 
amusement,  and  sometimes  with  a  notable 
impatience.  This  way  of  regarding  the  world 
of  truth,  which  I  have  just  defined  as  mine,  is 
especially  and  most  vivaciously  attacked  by 
my  good  friends,  the  pragmatists,  —  a  group 
of  philosophers  who  have  of  late  been  dis- 
posed to  take  truth  under  their  especial  pro- 
tection, as  if  she  were  in  danger  from  the 
tendency  of  some  people  who  take  her  too 
seriously. 

When  I  mention  pragmatism,  I  inevitably 
bring  to  your  minds  the  name  of  one  whom 
we  all  honor,  —  the  philosopher  who  last  year 
so  persuasively  stated,  before  the  audience  of 

315 


THE  PHILOSOPHY   OF  LOYALTY 

this  Institute,  the  pragmatist  theory  of  philo- 
sophical method,  and  of  the  nature  of  truth. 
It  is  impossible  for  me  to  do  any  justice,  within 
my  limits,  to  the  exposition  which  Professor 
James  gave  of  his  own  theory  of  truth.  Yet 
since  the  antithesis  between  his  views  and 
those  which  I  have  now  to  indicate  to  you 
may  be  in  itself  an  aid  to  my  own  exposition, 
I  beg  you  to  allow  me  to  use,  for  the  moment, 
some  of  his  assertions  about  the  nature  of 
truth  as  a  means  of  showing,  by  contrast,  how 
I  find  myself  obliged  to  interpret  the  same 
problem.  The  contrast  is  accompanied,  after 
all,  by  so  much  of  deeper  agreement  that  I 
can  well  hope  that  my  sketch  of  the  current 
situation  in  the  philosophical  controversies 
about  truth  may  not  seem  to  you  merely  a 
dreary  report  of  differences  of  opinion. 

Professor  James,  in  discussing  the  nature 
of  truth,  in  his  recent  book  on  pragmatism, 
begins,  as  some  of  you  will  remember,  by 
accepting  the  classic  definition  of  truth  as 
the  agreement  of  our  ideas  with  reality. 
Whoever   knows    or   possesses    a    truth   has, 

316 


LOYALTY,   TRUTH,   AND   REALITY 

then,  in  his  mind,  an  idea,  an  opinion,  a  judg- 
ment, or  some  complex  of  such  states  of 
mind.  If  his  views  are  true,  then  these  his 
ideas  or  opinions  are  in  agreement  with 
something  called  reality.  Thus,  for  instance, 
if  a  loyal  man  believes  his  cause,  say,  his 
friendship  or  his  club  or  his  nation,  to  be  a 
reality,  and  if  his  belief  is  true,  his  loyal  opin- 
ion is  in  agreement  with  the  real  world.  So 
far,  of  course,  all  of  you  will  accept  the  defi- 
nition of  truth  here  in  question. 

Professor  James  now  goes  on  to  point  out 
that,  in  some  cases,  our  ideas  agree  with  what 
we  call  real  things  by  copying  those  things. 
So,  if,  with  shut  eyes,  you  think  of  the  clock 
on  the  wall,  your  image  of  the  clock  is  a  copy 
of  its  dial.  But,  as  my  colleague  continues, 
our  power  to  copy  real  objects  by  ideas  of  our 
own  is  obviously  a  very  limited  power.  You 
believe  that  you  have  at  least  some  true  ideas 
about  many  objects  which  are  far  too  complex 
or  too  mysterious  for  you  to  copy  them.  Your 
power  to  become  sure  that  your  ideas  do  copy 
the  constitution  of  anything  whatever  which 

317 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF    LOYALTY 

exists  outside  of  you  is  also  very  limited,  be- 
cause, after  all,  you  never  get  outside  of  your 
own  experience  to  see  what  the  real  things 
would  be  if  taken  wholly  in  themselves. 
Hence,  on  the  whole,  one  cannot  say  that  the 
agreement  of  our  ideas  with  reality  which 
constitutes  their  truth  is  essentially  such  as  to 
demand  that  our  ideas  should  be  copies.  For 
we  believe  that  we  have  true  ideas  even  when 
we  do  not  believe  them  to  be  copies. 

Moreover  (and  herewith  we  approach  a 
consideration  which  is,  for  my  colleague's 
theory  of  truth,  very  essential),  not  only 
does  truth  not  consist  merely  in  copying  facts ; 
but  also  truth  cannot  be  defined  in  terms  of 
any  other  static  or  fixed  relation  between  ideas 
and  facts.  The  only  way  to  conceive  that 
agreement  between  ideas  and  facts  which 
constitutes  truth  is  to  think  of  the  "practical 
consequences"  which  follow  from  possessing 
true  ideas.  "True  ideas,"  in  Professor 
James's  words,  "lead  us,  namely,  through  the 
acts  and  other  ideas  which  they  instigate,  into 
or  up  to  or  towards  other  parts  of  experience 

318 


LOYALTY,   TRUTH,   AND   REALITY 

with  which  we  feel  all  the  while  that  the  orig- 
inal ideas  remain  in  agreement.  The  con- 
nections and  transitions  come  to  us,  from 
point  to  point,  as  being  progressive,  harmo- 
nious, satisfactory.  This  function  of  agree- 
able leading  is  what  we  mean  by  an  idea's 
verification."  So  far  my  colleague's  words. 
He  goes  on,  in  his  account,  to  mention  many 
illustrations  of  the  way  in  which  the  truth  of 
ideas  is  tested,  both  in  the  world  of  common 
sense,  and  in  the  world  of  science,  by  the  use- 
fulness, by  the  success,  which  attaches  to  the 
following  out  of  true  ideas  to  their  actual 
empirical  consequences.  The  wanderer  lost 
in  the  woods  gets  true  ideas  about  his  where- 
abouts whenever  he  hits  upon  experiences  and 
ideas  which  set  him  following  the  path  which 
actually  leads  him  home.  In  science,  hy- 
potheses are  tested  as  to  their  truth,  by  con- 
sidering what  experiences  they  lead  us  to 
anticipate,  and  by  then  seeing  whether  these 
anticipations  can  be  fulfilled  in  a  satisfactory 
way.  "True,"  says  Professor  James,  "is  the 
name  for  whatever  idea  starts  the  verification 

319 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

process."  For  instance,  then,  the  verifiable 
scientific  hypothesis,  if  once  tested  by  the 
success  of  its  results  in  experience,  is  in  so  far 
declared  true.  And  similarly,  the  idea  of 
following  a  given  path  in  the  woods  in  order 
to  get  home  is  declared  true,  if  you  follow  the 
path  and  get  home. 

In  consequence,  every  true  idea  is  such  in 
so  far  as  it  is  useful  in  enabling  you  to  an- 
ticipate the  sort  of  experience  that  you  want ; 
and  every  idea  that  is  useful  as  a  guide  of 
life  is  in  so  far  true.  The  personal  tests  of 
usefulness,  as  of  truth,  are  for  every  one  of 
us  personal  and  empirical.  My  own  direct 
tests  of  truth  are  of  course  thus  limited  to  my 
own  experience.  I  find  my  own  ideas  true 
just  in  so  far  as  I  find  them  guiding  me  to  the 
experience  that  I  want  to  get.  But  of  course, 
as  my  colleague  constantly  insists,  we  give 
credit,  as  social  beings,  to  one  another's  veri- 
fications. Hence  I  regard  as  true  many  ideas 
that  I  personally  have  not  followed  out  to  any 
adequately  experienced  consequences.  The 
"overwhelmingly  large"  number  of  the  ideas 

320 


LOYALTY,    TRUTH,   AND   REALITY 

by  which  we  live,  "we  let  pass  for  true  with- 
out attempting  to  verify."  We  do  this,  says 
Professor  James,  "because  it  works  to  do  so, 
everything  we  know  conspiring  with  the  belief, 
and  nothing  interfering."  That  is,  we  regard 
as  true  those  ideas  which  we  personally  find  it 
convenient,  successful,  expedient  to  treat  as 
verifiable,  even  though  we  never  verify  them. 
The  warrant  of  these  unverifiable  truths  is, 
however,  once  more,  the  empirical  usefulness 
of  living  as  if  they  were  verifiable.  "Truth 
lives,"  says  Professor  James,  "for  the  most 
part  on  a  credit  system.  .  .  .  But  this  all 
points  to  direct  face-to-face  verification  some- 
where, without  which  the  fabric  of  truth  col- 
lapses like  a  financial  system  with  no  cash 
basis  whatever.  You  accept  my  verification 
of  one  thing,  I  yours  of  another.  We  trade 
on  each  other's  truth.  But  beliefs  verified 
concretely  by  somebody  are  the  posts  of  the 
whole  superstructure."  The  indirectly  veri- 
fiable ideas,  that  is,  the  ideas  which  some- 
body else  verifies,  or  even  those  which  nobody 
yet  verifies,  but  which  agree  sufficiently  with 

y  321 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

verified  ideas,  we  accept  because  it  is  advan- 
tageous to  accept  them.  It  is  the  same  thing, 
then,  to  say  that  an  idea  is  true  because  it  is 
useful  and  to  say  that  it  is  useful  because  it  is 
true. 

Agreement  with  reality  thus  turns  out,  as 
my  colleague  insists,  "to  be  an  affair  of  lead- 
ing, —  leading  that  is  useful  because  it  is  into 
quarters  that  contain  objects  that  are  im- 
portant." And  my  colleague's  account  of 
truth  culminates  in  these  notable  expressions : 
'"The  true,'  to  put  it  very  briefly,  is  only  the 
expedient  in  the  way  of  our  thinking,  just  as 
'the  right'  is  only  the  expedient  in  the  way  of 
our  behaving."  "Pragmatism  faces  forward 
towards  the  future."  That  is,  an  idea  is  true 
by  virtue  of  its  expedient  outcome.  "It  pays 
for  our  ideas  to  be  validated,  verified.  Our 
obligation  to  seek  truth  is  part  of  our  general 
obligation  to  do  what  pays.  The  payment 
true  ideas  bring  are  the  sole  why  of  our  duty 
to  follow  them." 

The  sum  and  substance  of  this  theory  of 
truth,  as  you  see,  is  that  the  truth  of  an  idea 

322 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

is  determined  by  its  "success"  in  yielding 
what  my  colleague  frequently  calls  "the  cash 
values  in  terms  of  experience,"  which  appear 
as  consequences  of  holding  this  idea.  These 
values  may  either  take  the  form  of  direct 
verifications  in  terms  of  sensible  facts,  as 
when  one  finds  one's  way  out  of  the  woods 
and  sees  one's  home;  or  else  the  form  of 
practically  satisfying  and  expedient  beliefs, 
which  clash  with  no  sensible  experience,  and 
which  are  personally  acceptable  to  those  who 
hold  them.  It  is  "expedient"  to  connect  the 
latter  beliefs  with  sensible  cash  values  when 
you  can.  If  you  cannot  turn  them  into  such 
cash,  you  are  at  liberty  to  hold  them,  but  with 
the  conviction  that,  after  all,  the  personally 
expedient  is  the  true. 

In  any  case,  as  you  see,  whatever  else  truth 
is,  it  is  nothing  static.  It  changes  with  the 
expediencies  of  your  experience.  And  there- 
fore those  who  conceive  the  realm  of  truth  as 
essentially  eternal  are  the  objects  of  my  col- 
league's most  charming  philosophical  fury. 


323 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

IV 

We  have,  then,  an  authoritative  exposition  of 
pragmatism  before  us.  You  must  see  that 
this  doctrine,  whether  it  be  a  true  doctrine, 
or  whether  it  be  indeed  simply  for  some 
people  an  expedient  doctrine,  is  certainly  one 
that  concerns  our  philosophy  of  loyalty,  now 
that  indeed  we  have  reached  the  place  where 
the  relation  between  loyalty  and  truth  has 
become,  for  us,  a  critically  important  relation. 
May  we  venture  to  ask  ourselves,  then :  Is 
this  pragmatism  a  fair  expression  of  what  we 
mean  by  truth  ? 

In  reply  let  me  at  once  point  out  the 
extent  to  which  I  personally  agree  with  my 
colleague,  and  accept  his  theory  of  truth. 
I  fully  agree  with  him  that  whenever  a  man 
asserts  a  truth,  his  assertion  is  a  deed,  —  a 
practical  attitude,  an  active  acknowledgment 
of  some  fact.  I  fully  agree  that  the  effort  to 
verify  this  acknowledgment  by  one's  own 
personal  experience,  and  the  attempt  to  find 
truth   in   the   form   of   a   practical   congruity 

324 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

between  our  assertions  and  our  attained  em- 
pirical results,  is  an  effort  which  in  our  in- 
dividual lives  inevitably  accompanies  and 
sustains  our  every  undertaking  in  the  cause 
of  truth  seeking.  Modern  pragmatism  is  not 
indeed  as  original  as  it  seems  to  suppose  itself 
to  be  in  emphasizing  such  views.  The  whole 
history  of  modern  idealism  is  full  of  such  asser- 
tions. I  myself,  as  a  teacher  of  philosophy, 
have  for  years  insisted  upon  viewing  truth  in 
this  practical  way.  I  must  joyously  confess 
to  you  that  I  was  first  taught  to  view  the 
nature  of  truth  in  this  way  when  I  was  a 
young  student  of  philosophy;  and  I  was 
taught  this  by  several  great  masters  of  modern 
thought.  These  masters  were  Kant,  Fichte, 
Hegel,  and  Professor  James  himself,  whose 
lectures,  as  I  heard  them  in  my  youth  at  the 
Johns  Hopkins  University,  and  whose  beau- 
tiful conversations  and  letters  in  later  years, 
inspired  me  with  an  insight  that  helped  me, 
rather  against  his  own  advice,  to  read  my 
German  idealists  aright,  and  to  see  what  is, 
after  all,   the  eternal  truth  beneath   all   this 

325 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

pragmatism.  For  Professor  James's  prag- 
matism, despite  its  entertaining  expressions 
of  horror  of  the  eternal,  actually  does  state 
one  aspect  of  eternal  truth.  It  is,  namely, 
eternally  true  that  all  search  for  truth  is  a 
practical  activity,  with  an  ethical  purpose, 
and  uiat  a  purely  theoretical  truth,  such  as 
should  guide  no  significant  active  process,  is  a 
barren  absurdity.  This,  however,  is  so  far 
precisely  what  Fichte  spent  his  life  in  teach- 
ing. Professor  James  taught  me,  as  a  stu- 
dent, much  the  same  lesson ;  and  I  equally 
prize  and  honor  all  of  my  masters  for  that 
lesson ;  and  I  have  been  trying  to  live  up  to  it 
ever  since  I  first  began  to  study  the  nature  of 
truth. 

So  far,  then,  I  am  a  pragmatist.  And  I 
also  fully  agree  that,  if  we  ever  get  truth,  the 
attainment  of  truth  means  a  living  and  prac- 
tical success  in  those  active  undertakings  in 
terms  of  which  we  have  been  trying  to  assert 
and  to  verify  our  truth.  I  doubt  not  that 
to  say,  "This  is  true,"  is  the  same  as  to  say: 
"The  ideas  by  means  of  which  I  define  this 

326 


LOYALTY,   TRUTH,   AND   REALITY 

truth  are  the  practically  and  genuinely  suc- 
cessful ideas,  the  ideas  such  that,  when  I  fol- 
low them,  I  really  fulfil  my  deepest  needs." 
All  this  I  not  only  admit;  but  I  earnestly 
insist  that  truth  is  an  ethical  concept;  and  I 
thank  from  my  heart  the  great  pragmatist 
who  so  fascinated  his  audience  last  year  in 
this  place;  I  thank  him  that  he  taught  them 
what,  in  my  youth,  he  helped  to  teach  me, 
namely,  that  winning  the  truth  means  winning 
the  success  which  we  need,  and  for  which  the 
whole  practical  nature  of  our  common  hu- 
manity continually  groans  and  travails  to- 
gether in  pain  until  now. 

And  yet,  and  yet  all  this  still  leaves  open  one 
great  question.  When  we  seek  truth,  we 
indeed  seek  successful  ideas.  But  what,  in 
Heaven's  name,  constitutes  success  ?  Truth- 
seeking  is  indeed  a  practical  endeavor.  But 
what,  in  the  name  of  all  the  loyal,  is  the 
goal  of  human  endeavor?  Truth  is  a  living 
thing.  We  want  leading  and  guidance. 
"Lead,  kindly  light," — thus  we  address  the 
truth.      We  are  lost  in  the  woods  of   time. 

327 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

We  want  the  way,  the  truth,  and  the  life. 
For  nothing  else  does  all  our  science  and 
our  common  sense  strive.  But  what  is  it  to 
have  genuine  abundance  of  life?  For  what 
do  we  live  ? 


Here  our  entire  philosophy  of  loyalty,  so  far 
as  it  has  yet  been  developed,  comes  to  our  aid. 
The  loyal,  as  we  have  said,  are  the  only  human 
beings  who  can  have  any  reasonable  hope  of 
genuine  success.  If  they  do  not  succeed,  then 
nobody  succeeds.  And  of  course  the  loyal 
do  indeed  live  with  a  constant,  although  not 
with  an  exclusive,  reference  to  their  own 
personal  experience  and  to  that  of  other  in- 
dividual men.  They  feel  their  present  fas- 
cination for  their  cause.  It  thrills  through 
them.  Their  loyalty  has,  even  for  them,  in 
their  individual  capacity  what  Professor  James 
calls  a  cash  value.  And  of  course  they  like 
to  have  their  friends  share  such  cash  values. 
Yet  I  ask  you :  Are  the  loyal  seeking  only  the 
mere   collection   of  their   private   experiences 

328 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

of  their  personal  thrills  of  fascination  ?  If 
you  hear  loyal  men  say:  "We  are  in  this 
business  just  for  what  we  as  individuals — we 
and  our  individual  fellows  —  can  get  out  of  it," 
do  you  regard  that  way  of  speech  as  an  ade- 
quate expression  of  their  really  loyal  spirit  ? 
When  Arnold  von  Winkelried  rushed  on  the 
Austrian  spears,  did  he  naturally  say :  "  Look 
you,  my  friends,  I  seek,  in  experiential  terms, 
the  cash  value  of  my  devotion ;  see  me 
draw  the  cash."  My  colleague  would  of 
course  retort  that  the  hero  in  question,  accord- 
ing to  the  legend,  said,  as  he  died:  "Make 
way  for  liberty."  He  therefore  wanted  lib- 
erty, as  one  may  insist,  to  get  these  cash  values. 
Yes,  but  liberty  was  no  individual  man,  and 
no  mere  heap  of  individual  men.  Liberty 
was  a  cause,  a  certain  superhuman  unity  of 
the  ideal  life  of  a  free  community.  It  was 
indeed  expedient  that  one  man  should  die  for 
the  people.  But  the  people  also  was  an  unio 
mystica  of  many  in  one.  For  that  cause  the 
hero  died.  And  no  man  has  ever  yet  experi- 
enced, in  his  private  and  individual  life,  the 

329 


THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF   LOYALTY 

whole  true  cash  value  of  that  higher  unity. 
Nor  will  all  the  individual  Swiss  patriots,  past, 
present,  or  future,  viewed  as  a  mere  collec- 
tion of  creatures  of  a  day,  ever  draw  the  cash 
in  question.  If  the  cause  exists,  the  treasure 
exists,  and  is  indeed  a  cash  value  upon  a  level 
higher  than  that  of  our  passing  human  life. 
But  loyalty  does  not  live  by  selling  its  goods 
for  present  cash  in  the  temple  of  its  cause. 
Such  pragmatism  it  drives  out  of  the  temple. 
It  serves,  and  worships,  and  says  to  the  cause : 
"Be  thine  the  glory." 

Loyalty,  then,  seeks  success  and  from  mo- 
ment to  moment  indeed  thrills  with  a  purely 
fragmentary  and  temporary  joy  in  its  love  of 
its  service.  But  the  joy  depends  on  a  belief 
in  a  distinctly  superhuman  type  of  unity  of 
life.  And  so  you  indeed  cannot  express  the 
value  of  your  loyalty  by  pointing  at  the  mere 
heap  of  the  joyous  thrills  of  the  various  loyal 
individuals.  The  loyal  serve  a  real  whole  of 
life,  an  experiential  value  too  rich  for  any  ex- 
pression in  merely  momentary  terms. 

Now,  is  it  not  very  much  so  with  our  love  of 

330 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

any  kind  of  truth  ?  Of  course,  we  mortals 
seek  for  whatever  verification  of  our  truths 
we  can  get  in  the  form  of  present  success. 
But  can  you  express  our  human  definition  of 
truth  in  terms  of  any  collection  of  our  human 
experiences  of  personal  expediency? 

Well,  as  to  our  concept  of  truth,  let  us  con- 
sider a  test  case  by  way  of  helping  ourselves 
to  answer  this  question.  Let  us  suppose  that 
a  witness  appears,  upon  some  witness-stand, 
and  objects  to  taking  the  ordinary  oath,  be- 
cause he  has  conscientious  scruples,  due  to 
the  fact  that  he  is  a  recent  pragmatist,  who 
has  a  fine  new  definition  of  truth,  in  terms  of 
which  alone  he  can  be  sworn.  Let  us  suppose 
him,  hereupon,  to  be  granted  entire  liberty 
to  express  his  oath  in  his  own  way.  Let  him 
accordingly  say,  using,  with  technical  scrupu- 
losity, my  colleague's  definition  of  truth:  "I 
promise  to  tell  whatever  is  expedient  and 
nothing  but  what  is  expedient,  so  help  me  fu- 
ture experience."  I  ask  you :  Do  you  think 
that  this  witness  has  expressed,  with  adequacy, 
that  view  of  the  nature  of  truth  that  you  really 

331 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

wish  a  witness  to  have  in  mind  ?  Of  course, 
if  he  were  a  typical  pragmatist,  you  would  in- 
deed be  delighted  to  hear  his  testimony  on  the 
witness-stand  or  anywhere  else.  But  would 
you  accept  his  formula? 

But  let  me  be  more  precise  as  to  the  topic 
of  this  witness's  possible  testimony.  I  will 
use  for  the  purpose  Kant's  famous  case. 
Somebody,  now  dead,  let  us  suppose,  has 
actually  left  with  the  witness  a  sum  of  money 
as  a  wholly  secret  deposit  to  be  some  time 
returned.  No  written  record  was  made  of  the 
transaction.  No  evidence  exists  that  can  in 
future  be  used  to  refute  the  witness  if  he  denies 
the  transaction  and  keeps  the  money.  The 
questions  to  be  asked  of  the  witness  relate, 
amongst  other  things,  to  whatever  it  may  be 
that  he  believes  himself  to  know  about  the 
estate  of  the  deceased.  I  now  ask,  not  what 
his  duty  is,  but  simply  what  it  is  that  he  ra- 
tionally means  to  do  in  case  he  really  intends 
to  tell  the  truth  about  that  deposit.  Does 
he  take  merely  the  "forward-looking"  atti- 
tude  of   my   colleague's   pragmatism?     Does 

332 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

he  mean  merely  to  predict,  as  expedient,  cer- 
tain consequences  which  he  expects  to  result 
either  to  himself  or  to  the  heirs  of  the  estate  ? 
Of  course  his  testimony  will  have  consequences. 
But  is  it  these  which  he  is  trying  to  predict? 
Are  they  his  true  object?  Or  does  the  truth 
of  his  statement  mean  the  same  as  the  expe- 
diency, either  to  himself  or  to  the  heirs,  of  any 
consequences  whatever  which  may  follow  from 
his  statement  ?  Does  the  truth  of  his  state- 
ment about  the  deposit  even  mean  the  merely 
present  empirical  fact  that  he  now  feels  a  belief 
in  this  statement  or  that  he  finds  it  just  now 
congruent  with  the  empirical  sequences  of  his 
present  memories  ?  No,  for  the  witness  is  not 
trying  merely  to  tell  how  he  feels.  He  is  try- 
ing to  tell  the  truth  about  the  deposit.  And  the 
witness's  belief  is  not  the  truth  of  his  belief. 
Even  his  memory  is  not  the  truth  to  which  he 
means  to  be  a  witness.  And  the  future  con- 
sequences of  his  making  a  true  statement  are 
for  the  witness  irrelevant,  since  they  are  for 
the  law  and  the  heirs  to  determine.  Yet  one 
means    something    perfectly  definite   by   the 

333 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

truth  of  the  testimony  of  that  witness.  And 
that  truth  is  simply  inexpressible  in  such  terms 
as  those  which  my  colleague  employs.  Yet  the 
truth  here  in  question  is  a  simple  truth  about 
the  witness's  own  personal  past  experience. 

Now,  such  a  case  is  only  one  of  countless 
cases  where  we  are  trying  to  tell  the  truth 
about  something  which  we  all  regard  as  being, 
in  itself,  a  matter  of  genuine  and  concrete 
experience,  while  nevertheless  we  do  not  mean, 
"It  is  expedient  just  now  for  me  to  think  this," 
nor  yet,  "I  predict  such  and  such  consequences 
for  my  own  personal  experience,  or  for  the 
future  experience  of  some  other  individual 
man;  and  these  predicted  consequences  con- 
stitute the  truth  of  my  present  assertion." 
I  say  there  are  countless  such  cases  where  the 
truth  that  we  mean  is  empirical  indeed,  but 
transcends  all  such  expediencies  and  personal 
consequences.  The  very  assertion,  "Human 
experience,  taken  as  a  totality  of  facts,  exists," 
is  a  momentous  example  of  just  such  an  asser- 
tion. We  all  believe  that  assertion.  If  that 
assertion  is  not  actually  true,  then  our  whole 

334 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

frame  of  natural  science,  founded  as  it  is  on  the 
common  experience  of  many  observers,  crum- 
bles into  dust,  our  common  sense  world  is 
nothing,  business  and  society  are  alike  illu- 
sions, loyalty  to  causes  is  meaningless.  Now 
that  assertion,  "Human  experience,  that  is, 
the  totality  of  the  experiences  of  many  men, 
really  exists,"  is  an  assertion  which  you  and  I 
regard  as  perfectly  true.  Yet  no  individual 
man  ever  has  verified,  or  ever  will  verify,  that 
assertion.  For  no  man,  taken  as  this  indi- 
vidual man,  experiences  the  experience  of  any- 
body but  himself.  Yet  we  all  regard  that  as- 
sertion as  true. 

My  colleague,  of  course,  would  say,  as  in  fact 
he  has  often  said,  that  his  assertion  is  one  of 
the  numerous  instances  of  that  process  of 
trading  on  credit  which  he  so  freely  illustrates. 
We  do  not  verify  this  assertion.  But  we 
accept  it  on  credit  as  verifiable.  However, 
the  credit  simile  is  a  dangerous  one  here,  so 
long  as  one  conceives  that  the  verification 
which  would  pay  the  cash  would  be  a  payment 
in   the  form   of    such    human   experience   as 

335 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

you  and  I  possess.  For  the  assertion,  "The 
experience  of  many  men  exists,"  is  an  assertion 
that  is  essentially  un verifiable  by  any  one  man. 
If  the  "cash  value"  of  the  assertion  means, 
then,  its  verifiability  by  any  man,  then  the 
credit  in  question  is  one  that  simply  cannot 
be  turned  into  such  cash  by  any  conceivable 
process,  occurring  in  our  individual  lives, 
since  the  very  idea  of  the  real  existence  of 
the  experience  of  many  men  excludes,  by  its 
definition,  the  direct  presence  of  this  experience 
of  various  men  within  the  experience  of  any 
one  of  these  men.  The  credit  value  in  ques- 
tion would  thus  be  a  mere  fiat  value,  so  long 
as  the  only  cash  values  are  those  of  the  expe- 
riences of  individual  men,  and  the  truth  of 
our  assertion  would  mean  simply  that  we  find 
it  expedient  to  treat  as  verifiable  what  we 
know  cannot  be  verified.  Hereupon,  of  course, 
we  should  simply  be  trading  upon  currency 
that  has  no  cash  value.  Whoever  does  verify 
the  fact  that  the  experience  of  many  men 
exists,  if  such  a  verifier  there  be,  is  a  super- 
human being,  ak  union  of  the  empirical  lives 

336 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

of  many  men  in  the  complex  of  a  single  expe- 
rience. And  if  our  credit  of  the  assertion  that 
many  men  exist  is  convertible  into  cash  at  all, 
that  cash  is  not  laid  up  where  the  moth  and 
rust  of  our  private  human  experience  doth  from 
moment  to  moment  corrupt  the  very  data  that 
we  see;  but  is  laid  up  in  a  realm  where  our 
experiences,  past,  present,  future,  are  the  ob- 
ject of  a  conspectus  that  is  not  merely  temporal 
and  transient.  Now  all  the  natural  sciences 
make  use  of  the  persuasion  that  the  experiences 
of  various  men  exist,  and  that  there  is  a  unity 
of  such  experiences.  This  thesis,  then,  is  no 
invention  of  philosophers. 

My  colleague,  in  answer,  would  of  course 
insist  that  as  a  fact  you  and  I  are  now  believing 
that  many  men  exist,  and  that  human  experi- 
ence in  its  entirety  exists,  merely  because,  in  the 
long  run,  we  find  that  this  belief  is  indeed 
congruous  with  our  current  and  purely  per- 
sonal experience,  and  is  therefore  an  expedi- 
ent idea  of  ours.  But  I,  in  answer,  insist  that 
common  sense  well  feels  this  belief  to  be  indeed 
from  moment  to  moment  expedient,  and  yet 

z  337 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

clearly  distinguishes  between  that  expediency 
and  the  truth  which  common  sense  all  the  while 
attributes  to  the  belief.  The  distinction  is  pre- 
cisely the  one  which  my  fancied  illustration  of 
the  pragmatist  on  the  witness-stand  has  sug- 
gested. It  is  a  perfectly  universal  distinction 
and  a  commonplace  one.  Tell  me,  "This 
opinion  is  true,"  and  whatever  you  are  talking 
about  I  may  agree  or  disagree  or  doubt;  yet 
in  any  case  you  have  stated  a  momentous  issue. 
But  tell  me,  "I  just  now  find  this  belief 
expedient,  it  feels  to  me  congruous"  and  you 
have  explicitly  given  me  just  a  scrap  of  your 
personal  biography,  and  have  told  me  no  other 
truth  whatever  than  a  truth  about  the  present 
state  of  your  feelings. 

If,  however,  you  emphasize  my  colleague's 
wording  to  the  effect  that  a  truth  is  such  because 
it  proves  to  be  an  idea  that  is  expedient  "in 
the  long  run,"  I  once  more  ask  you:  When 
does  a  man  experience  the  whole  of  the  real 
facts  about  the  "long  run"?  At  the  begin- 
ning of  the  long  run,  when  the  end  is  not  yet, 
or  at  the  end,  when,  perhaps,  he  forgets,  like 

338 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

many  older  men,  what  were  once  the  expe- 
diencies of  his  youth  ?  What  decides  the  truth 
about  the  long  run  ?  My  exalted  moments, 
when  anything  that  I  like  seems  true,  or  my 
disappointed  moments,  when  I  declare  that  I 
have  always  had  bad  luck?  To  appeal  to 
the  genuinely  real  "long  run"  is  only  to  appeal 
in  still  another  form  to  a  certain  ideally  fair 
conspectus  of  my  own  whole  life,  —  a  conspec- 
tus which  I,  in  my  private  human  experience, 
never  get.  Whoever  gets  the  conspectus  of 
my  whole  life,  to  see  what,  in  the  long  run,  is 
indeed  for  me  expedient,  —  whoever,  I  say, 
gets  that  conspectus,  if  such  a  being  there  indeed 
is,  —  is  essentially  superhuman  in  his  type  of 
consciousness.  For  he  sees  what  I  only  get 
in  the  form  of  an  idea ;  namely,  the  true  sense 
and  meaning  of  my  life. 

In  vain,  then,  does  one  try  adequately  to  de- 
fine the  whole  of  what  we  mean  by  truth  either 
in  terms  of  our  human  feelings  of  expediency 
or  in  terms  of  our  instantaneous  thrills  of  joy 
in  success,  or  in  terms  of  any  other  verifications 
that  crumble  as  the  instant  flies.     All  such 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

verifications  we  use,  just  as  we  use  whatever 
perishes.  Any  such  object  is  a  fragment,  but 
we  want  the  whole.  Truth  is  itself  a  cause, 
and  is  largely  as  one  must  admit,  for  us  mortals, 
just  now,  what  we  called,  in  our  last  lecture, 
a  lost  cause  —  else  how  should  these  prag- 
matists  be  able  thus  to  imagine  a  vain  thing, 
and  call  that  truth  which  is  but  the  crumbling 
expediency  of  the  moment  ?  Our  search  for 
truth  is  indeed  a  practical  process.  The 
attainment  of  truth  means  success.  Our  veri- 
fications, so  far  as  we  ever  get  them,  are  mo- 
mentary fragments  of  that  success.  But  the 
genuine  success  that  we  demand  is  an  ethical 
success,  of  precisely  the  type  which  all  the 
loyal  seek,  when  they  rejoice  in  giving  all  for 
their  cause. 

VI 
But  you  will  now  all  the  more  eagerly  de- 
mand in  what  sense  we  can  ever  get  any  war- 
rant for  saying  that  we  know  any  truth  what- 
ever. In  seeking  truth  we  do  not  seek  the  mere 
crumbling  successes  of  the  passing  instants 
of  human  life.     We  seek  a  city  out  of  sight. 

340 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

What  we  get  of  success  within  our  passing 
experience  is  rationally  as  precious  to  us  as  it  is, 
just  because  we  believe  that  attainment  to  be 
a  fragment  of  an  essentially  superhuman  suc- 
cess, which  is  won  in  the  form  of  a  higher  expe- 
rience than  ours,  —  a  conspectus  wherein  our 
human  experiences  are  unified.  But  what 
warrant  have  we  for  this  belief? 

I  will  tell  you  how  I  view  the  case.  We 
need  unity  of  life.  In  recognizing  that  need 
my  own  pragmatism  consists.  Now,  we  never 
find  unity  present  to  our  human  experience  in 
more  than  a  fragmentary  shape.  We  get 
hints  of  higher  unity.  But  only  the  frag- 
mentary unity  is  won  at  any  moment  of  our 
lives.  We  therefore  form  ideas  —  very  fallible 
ideas  —  of  some  unity  of  experience,  an  unity 
such  as  our  idea  of  any  science  or  any  art  or 
any  united  people  or  of  any  community  or  of 
any  other  cause,  any  other  union  of  many  hu- 
man experiences  in  one,  defines.  Now,  if  our 
ideas  are  in  any  case  indeed  true,  then  such  an 
unity  is  as  a  fact  successfully  experienced  upon 
some  higher  level  than  ours,  and  is  experienced 

341 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

in  some  conspectus  of  life  which  wins  what  we 
need,  which  approves  our  loyalty,  which  fulfils 
our  rational  will,  and  which  has  in  its  whole- 
ness what  we  seek.  And  then  we  ourselves 
with  all  our  ideas  and  strivings  are  in  and  of 
this  higher  unity  of  life.  Our  loyalty  to  truth 
is  a  hint  of  this  unity.  Our  transient  successes 
are  fragments  of  the  true  success.  But  sup- 
pose our  ideas  about  the  structure  of  this  higher 
unity  to  be  false  in  any  of  their  details.  Sup- 
pose, namely,  any  of  our  causes  to  be  wrongly 
viewed  by  us.  Then  there  is  still  real  that 
state  of  facts,  whatever  it  is,  which,  if  just  now 
known  to  us,  would  show  us  this  falsity  of 
our  various  special  ideas.  Now,  only  an  expe- 
rience, a  consciousness  of  some  system  of  con- 
tents, could  show  the  falsity  of  any  idea.  Hence 
this  real  state  of  facts,  this  constitution  of  the 
genuine  universe,  whatever  it  is,  must  again  be 
a  reality  precisely  in  so  far  as  it  is  also  a  con- 
spectus of  facts  of  experience. 

We  therefore  already  possess  at  least  one 
true  idea,  precisely  in  so  far  as  we  say:  "The 
facts  of  the  world  are  what  they  are ;  the  real 

342 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

universe  exposes  our  errors  and  makes  them 
errors."  And  when  we  say  this,  we  once  more 
appeal  to  a  conspectus  of  experience  in  which 
ours  is  included.  For  I  am  in  error  only  in 
case  my  present  ideas  about  the  true  facts 
of  the  whole  world  of  experience  are  out  of 
concord  with  the  very  meaning  that  I  myself 
actively  try  to  assign  to  these  ideas.  My  ideas 
are  in  any  detail  false,  only  if  the  very  expe- 
rience to  which  I  mean  to  appeal,  contains  in 
its  conspectus  contents  which  I  just  now  im- 
perfectly conceive.  In  any  case,  then,  the 
truth  is  possessed  by  precisely  that  whole  of 
experience  which  I  never  get,  but  to  which 
my  colleague  also  inevitably  appeals  when  he 
talks  of  the  "long  run,"  or  of  the  experiences 
of  humanity  in  general. 

Whatever  the  truth,  then,  or  the  falsity  of 
any  of  my  special  convictions  about  this  or  that 
fact  may  be,  the  real  world,  which  refutes  my 
false  present  ideas  in  so  far  as  they  clash  with 
its  wholeness,  and  which  confirms  them  just 
in  so  far  as  they  succeed  in  having  significant 
relations  to  its  unity, — this  real  world,  I  say, 

343 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

is  a  conspectus  of  the  whole  of  experience. 
And  this  whole  of  experience  is  in  the  closest 
real  relation  to  my  practical  life,  precisely  in 
so  far  as,  for  me,  the  purpose  of  my  life  is  to 
get  into  unity  with  the  whole  universe,  and  pre- 
cisely in  so  far  as  the  universe  itself  is  just  that 
conspectus  of  experience  that  we  all  mean  to 
define  and  to  serve  whatever  we  do,  or  what- 
ever we  say. 

But  the  real  whole  conspectus  of  experience, 
the  real  view  of  the  totality  of  life,  the  real 
expression  of  that  will  to  live  in  and  for  the 
whole,  which  every  assertion  of  truth  and  every 
loyal  deed  expresses  —  well,  it  must  be  a  con- 
spectus that  includes  whatever  facts  are  indeed 
facts,  be  they  past,  present,  or  future.  I  call 
this  whole  of  experience  an  eternal  truth.  I  do 
not  thereby  mean,  as  my  colleague  seems  to 
imagine,  that  the  eternal  first  exists,  and  that 
then  our  life  in  time  comes  and  copies  that 
eternal  order.  I  mean  simply  that  the  whole 
of  experience  includes  all  temporal  happenings, 
contains  within  itself  all  changes,  and,  since 
it  is  the  one  whole  that  we  all  want  and  need, 

344 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

succeeds  in  so  far  as  it  supplements  all  failures, 
accepts  all,  even  the  blindest  of  services,  and 
wins  what  we  seek.  Thus  winning  it  is  prac- 
tically good  and  worthy. 

But  if  one  insists,  How  do  you  know  all 
this?  I  reply:  I  know  simply  that  to  try  to 
deny  the  reality  of  this  whole  of  truth  is  simply 
to  reaffirm  it.  Any  special  idea  of  mine  may 
be  wrong,  even  as  any  loyal  deed  may  fail,  or 
as  any  cause  may  become,  to  human  vision,  a 
lost  cause.  But  to  deny  that  there  is  truth, 
or  that  there  is  a  real  world,  is  simply  to  say 
that  the  whole  truth  is  that  there  is  no  whole 
truth,  and  that  the  real  fact  is  that  there  is 
no  fact  real  at  all.  Such  assertions  are  plain 
self-contradictions.  And  on  the  other  hand,  by 
the  term  "  real  world,"  defined  as  it  is  for  us  by 
our  ideal  needs,  we  mean  simply  that  whole  of 
experience  in  which  we  live,  and  in  unity  with 
which  we  alone  succeed. 

Loyalty,  then,  has  its  own  metaphysic. 
This  metaphysic  is  expressed  in  a  view  of 
things  which  conceives  our  experience  as  bound 
up  in  a  real  unity  with  all  experience,  —  an 

345 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

unity  which  is  essentially  good,  and  in  which 
all  our  ideas  possess  their  real  fulfilment  and 
success.  Such  a  view  is  true,  simply  because 
if  you  deny  its  truth  you  reaffirm  that  very 
truth  under  a  new  form. 

Truth,  meanwhile,  means,  as  pragmatism 
asserts,  the  fulfilment  of  a  need.  But  we  all 
need  the  superhuman,  the  city  out  of  sight,  the 
union  with  all  life,  —  the  essentially  eternal. 
This  need  is  no  invention  of  the  philosophers. 
It  is  the  need  which  all  the  loyal  feel,  whether 
they  know  it  or  not,  and  whether  they  call 
themselves  pragmatists  or  not.  To  define  this 
need  as  pragmatism  in  its  recent  forms  has 
done,  to  reduce  truth  to  expediency,  is  to  go 
about  crying  cash,  cash,  in  a  realm  where  there 
is  no  cash  of  the  sort  that  loyalty  demands, 
that  every  scientific  inquiry  presupposes,  and 
that  only  the  unity  of  the  experiences  of  many 
in  one  furnishes. 

If  we  must,  then,  conceive  recent  pragmatism 
under  the  figure  of  a  business  enterprise,  —  a 
metaphor  which  my  colleague's  phraseology 
so  insistently  invites,  —  I  am  constrained  there- 

346 


LOYALTY,  TRUTH,  AND  REALITY 

fore  to  sum  up  its  position  thus:  First,  with 
a  winning  clearness,  and  with  a  most  honor- 
able frankness  it  confesses  bankruptcy,  so 
far  as  the  actually  needed  cash  payments  of 
significant  truth  are  concerned.  Secondly, 
it  nevertheless  declines  to  go  into  the  hands 
of  any  real  receiver,  for  it  is  not  fond  of  any- 
thing that  appears  too  absolute.  And  thirdly, 
it  proposes  simply  and  openly  to  go  on  doing 
business  under  the  old  style  and  title  of  the 
truth.  "After  all,"  it  says,  "are  we  not,  every 
one  of  us,  fond  of  credit  values?" 

But  I  cannot  conceive  the  position  of  the 
loyal  to  be,  in  fact,  so  hopelessly  embarrassed 
as  this.  The  recent  pragmatists  themselves 
are,  in  fact,  practically  considered  very  loyal 
lovers  of  genuine  truth.  They  simply  have 
mistaken  the  true  state  of  their  accounts.  We 
all  know,  indeed,  little  enough.  But  the  loyal 
man,  I  think,  whether  he  imagines  himself 
to  be  a  recent  pragmatist  or  not,  has  a  ra- 
tional right  to  say  this:  My  cause  partakes 
of  the  nature  of  the  only  truth  and  reality  that 
there  is.     My  life  is  an  effort  to  manifest  such 

347 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

eternal  truth,  as  well  as  I  can,  in  a  series  of 
temporal  deeds.  I  may  serve  my  cause  ill. 
I  may  conceive  it  erroneously.  I  may  lose  it 
in  the  thicket  of  this  world  of  transient  expe- 
rience. My  every  human  deed  may  involve 
a  blunder.  My  mortal  life  may  seem  one 
long  series  of  failures.  But  I  know  that  my 
cause  liveth.  My  true  life  is  hid  with  the 
cause  and  belongs  to  the  eternal. 


3^cS 


VIII 

LOYALTY  AND  RELIGION 


LECTURE  VIII 

LOYALTY  AND   RELIGION 

WE  began  these  lectures  with  a  confessedly 
inadequate  definition  of  loyalty.  At  the 
last  time  we  laid  a  basis  for  a  new  definition  of 
loyalty.  In  this  concluding  lecture,  we  are  to 
develop  that  definition,  and  to  draw  conclusions 
regarding  the  relation  of  loyalty  to  religion. 
Both  enterprises  will  require  a  further  develop- 
ment of  our  theory  of  truth. 


Loyalty,  so  we  said  at  the  outset,  is  the  will- 
ing and  thoroughgoing  devotion  of  a  person 
to  a  cause.  We  defined  a  cause  as  something 
that  unifies  many  human  lives  in  one.  Our 
intent  in  making  these  definitions  was  mainly 
practical.  Our  philosophy  of  loyalty  was  and 
is  intended  to  be  a  practical  philosophy.  We 
used  our  definition  first  to  help  us  to  find  out 

351 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

the  purpose  of  life,  and  the  supreme  good  which 
human  beings  can  seek  for  themselves.  We 
found  this  good  to  be,  indeed,  of  a  paradoxical 
seeming.  It  was  a  good  found  only  by  an  act 
of  sacrifice.  We  then  developed  the  concep- 
tion of  loyalty  to  loyalty,  and  learned  that, 
with  this  means  of  defining  the  one  cause  which 
is  worthy  of  all  men's  devotion,  we  could  unify 
and  simplify  the  chaotic  code  of  our  conven- 
tional morality,  could  do  full  justice  to  the 
demands  of  a  rational  ethical  individualism, 
and  could  leave  to  every  man  his  right  and  his 
duty  to  choose  some  special  personal  cause  of 
his  own,  while  we  could  yet  state  the  ideal  of 
a  harmony  of  all  human  causes  in  one  all-em- 
bracing cause.  Upon  this  basis  we  also  could 
form  a  theory  of  conscience,  —  a  theory  which 
views  conscience  at  once  as  rational  and  uni- 
versal in  its  authority,  and  yet  as  individual 
in  its  expression  in  the  life  of  each  man,  so 
that  every  man's  conscience  remains  his  own, 
and  is,  to  himself,  in  many  ways,  mysterious ; 
while  the  whole  business  of  any  man's  conscience 
is,  nevertheless,  to  direct  that  man  to  find  his 

352 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

individual  place  in  the  one,  universal,  rational, 
moral  order. 

Hereupon  we  illustrated  our  theory  of  loyalty 
by  applying  it  to  a  study  of  some  of  our  own 
national  problems.  And  next,  our  account 
of  the  practice  of  loyalty  culminated  in  a  doc- 
trine of  the  nature  of  training  for  loyalty. 
Here  we  found  the  great  paradox  of  loyalty 
afresh  illustrated.  Loyalty  wins  not  only  by 
sacrifice,  but  also  by  painful  labor,  and  by  the 
very  agony  of  defeat.  In  this  our  human  world 
the  lost  causes  have  proved  themselves,  in 
history,  to  be  the  most  fruitful  causes.  In 
sum,  loyalty  is  trained  both  through  the  pres- 
ence of  personal  leaders,  and  through  that 
idealization  of  our  causes  which  adversity 
nourishes,  which  death  illumines,  and  which 
the  defeats  of  present  time  may  render  all  the 
clearer  and  more  ideally  fascinating. 

All  these  results  showed  us  that  loyalty  has 
about  it  a  character  such  as  forbids  us,  after 
all,  to  interpret  the  true  good  of  loyalty  in  terms 
of  our  merely  individual  human  experiences. 
Man  discovers,  indeed,  even  within  the  limits 

2  a  353 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

of  his  own  personal  experience,  that  loyalty 
is  his  ethical  destiny,  and  that  without  it  he 
can  win  no  peace ;  while,  with  loyalty  once  in 
possession  of  his  active  powers,  he  seems  to 
himself  to  have  solved  the  personal  problem 
of  the  purpose  of  his  life.  But  loyalty  thus 
appears,  after  all,  in  the  individual  life,  in  a 
deeply  mysterious  form.  It  says  to  a  man: 
"Your  true  good  can  never  be  won  and  veri- 
fied by  you  in  terms  to  which  the  present  form 
and  scope  of  our  human  experience  is  adequate. 
The  best  that  you  can  get  lies  in  self -surrender, 
and  in  your  personal  assurance  that  the  cause 
to  which  you  surrender  yourself  is  indeed  good. 
But  your  cause,  if  it  is  indeed  a  reality,  has  a 
good  about  it  which  no  one  man,  and  no  mere 
collection  of  men,  can  ever  verify.  This  good 
of  the  cause  is  essentially  superhuman  in  its 
type,  even  while  it  is  human  in  its  embodiment. 
For  it  belongs  to  an  union  of  men,  to  a  whole  of 
human  life  which  transcends  the  individuality 
of  any  man,  and  which  is  not  to  be  found  as 
something  belonging  to  any  mere  collection  of 
men.     Let  your  supreme  good,  then,  be  this, 

354 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

that  you  regard  the  cause  as  real,  as  good,  and 
that,  if  the  cause  be  lost  to  any  merely  human 
sight,  you  hold  it  to  be  nevertheless  living  in 
its  own  realm, — not  apart,  indeed,  from  human 
life,  but  in  the  form  of  the  fulfilment  of  many 
human  lives  in  one." 

Now,  this  mysterious  speech  of  loyalty  im- 
plies something  which  is  not  only  moral,  but 
also  metaphysical .  Purely  practical  considera- 
tions, then,  a  study  of  our  human  needs,  an 
ideal  of  the  business  of  life,  —  these  inevi- 
tably lead  us  into  a  region  which  is  more  than 
merely  a  realm  of  moral  activities.  This 
region  is  either  one  of  delusions  or  else  one  of 
spiritual  realities  of  a  level  higher  than  is 
that  of  our  present  individual  human  expe- 
rience. 

In  the  last  lecture  we  undertook  to  consider 
this  larger  realm  of  spiritual  unities  which 
must  be  real  in  case  our  loyalty  is  not  based 
upon  illusion.  And  we  attempted  to  sketch 
a  general  theory  of  truth  which  might  show  us 
that  such  spiritual  unities  are  indeed  realities, 
and  are  presupposed  by  our  every  effort  to 

365 


THE    PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

define  truth.  Thus  our  ethical  theory  has 
transformed  itself  into  a  general  philosophical 
doctrine;  and  loyalty  now  appears  to  us  not 
only  as  a  guide  of  life  but  as  a  revelation  of  our 
relation  to  a  realm  which  we  have  been  obliged 
to  define  as  one  of  an  eternal  and  all-embracing 
unity  of  spiritual  life. 

We  have  called  this  realm  of  true  life,  and  of 
genuine  and  united  experience,  —  this  realm 
which,  if  our  argument  at  the  last  time  was 
sound,  includes  our  lives  in  that  very  whole 
which  constitutes  the  real  universe,  —  we  have 
called  this  realm,  I  say,  an  eternal  world,  — 
eternal,  simply  because,  according  to  our 
theory,  it  includes  all  temporal  happenings 
and  strivings  in  the  conspectus  of  a  single  con- 
sciousness, and  fulfils  all  our  rational  purposes 
together,  and  is  all  that  we  seek  to  be.  For, 
as  we  argued,  this  realm  of  reality  is  conscious, 
ris  united,  is  self-possessed,  and  is  perfected 
through  the  very  wealth  of  the  ideal  sacrifices 
and  of  the  loyal  devotion  which  are  united  so 
as  to  constitute  its  fulness  of  being.  In  view 
of  the  philosophy  that  was  thus  sketched,  I 

356 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

now  propose  a  new  definition  of  loyalty;  and 
I  say  that  this  definition  results  from  all  of  our 
previous  study :  Loyalty  is  the  will  to  manifest, 
so  far  as  is  possible,  the  Eternal,  that  is,  the 
conscious  and  superhuman  unity  of  life,  in 
the  form  of  the  acts  of  an  individual  Self.  Or, 
if  you  prefer  to  take  the  point  of  view  of  an 
individual  human  self,  if  you  persist  in  looking 
at  the  world  just  as  we  find  it  in  our  ordinary 
experience,  and  if  you  regard  the  metaphysical 
doctrine  just  sketched  merely  as  an  ideal  theory 
of  life,  and  not  as  a  demonstrable  philosophy, 
I  can  still  hold  to  my  definition  of  loyalty 
by  borrowing  a  famous  phrase  from  the  dear 
friend  and  colleague  some  of  whose  views  I 
at  the  last  time  opposed.  I  can,  then,  simply 
state  my  new  definition  of  loyalty  in  plainer 
and  more  directly  obvious  terms  thus :  Loyalty 
is  the  Will  to  Believe  in  something  eternal,  and 
to  express  that  belief  in  the  practical  life  of 
a  human  being. 

This,  I  say,  is  my  new  definition  of  loyalty, 
and  in  its  metaphysical  form,  it  is  my  final 
definition.     Let  me  expound  it  further,  and 

357 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

let  me  show  a  little  more  in  detail  how  it  re- 
sults from  the  whole  course  of  our  inquiry. 

II 

However  kindly  you  may  have  followed  the 
discussion  of  my  last  lecture,  some  of  you  will 
feel  doubts  as  to  the  theory  of  truth  and  of 
reality  which  I  opposed  to  the  doctrines  of 
recent  pragmatism,  and  which  I  now  lay  at 
the  basis  of  my  final  definition  of  loyalty.  I 
approached  my  own  theory  by  the  way  of  a 
polemic  against  my  colleague's  recently  stated 
views  regarding  the  nature  of  truth.  But 
polemic  often  hinders  our  appreciation  of  some 
aspects  of  the  questions  at  issue,  even  while  it 
may  help  us  to  emphasize  others.  So  let  me 
now  point  out,  apart  from  a  polemic  against 
other  theories  of  truth,  what  is  my  main  mo- 
tive for  viewing  the  real  world  as  I  do,  and  why 
I  suppose  that  viewing  the  world  as  I  do  helps 
us  to  understand  better  the  business  of  loyalty. 

People  who  have  faith  in  this  or  in  that  form 
of  superhuman  and  significant  reality  often 
ask  what  they  can  do  to  turn  their  faith  into 

358 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

something  that  more  resembles  clear  insight. 
Shall  they  look  into  the  evidences  that  are 
adduced  in  favor  of  this  or  of  that  miraculous 
story?  Shall  they  themselves  seek  for  the 
miraculous  in  their  own  personal  experience  ? 
Will  psychical  research  throw  any  light  on  the 
mysteries  of  being?  Or,  perhaps,  will  some 
sort  of  special  mystical  training  reveal  the 
higher  truth  ?  What  is  the  way  that  leads 
towards  the  spiritual  world  ?  And  thus  those 
who  doubt  whether  there  are  such  higher  reali- 
ties to  be  found  still  sometimes  try  to  get  rid 
of  these  doubts  by  various  appeals  either  to 
more  or  less  magical  arts,  or  to  extraordinary 
personal  experiences,  or  to  mystical  transforma- 
tions of  their  personal  life. 

Now,  whatever  may  be  said  of  wonders,  or  of 
mystical  revelations,  our  philosophy  of  loyalty 
is  naturally  interested  in  pointing  out  a  road  to 
the  spiritual  world,  if,  indeed,  there  be  such  a 
world,  —  a  road,  I  say,  which  has  a  plain  rela- 
tion to  our  everyday  moral  life.  And  it  seems 
to  me,  both  that  there  is  a  genuinely  spiritual 
world,  and  that  there  is  a  path  of  inquiry  which 

359 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

can  lead  from  such  a  practical  faith  in  the 
higher  world  as  loyalty  embodies  in  its  deeds, 
to  a  rational  insight  into  the  general  constitu- 
tion of  this  higher  realm.  I  do  not  offer  my 
opinions  upon  this  subject  as  having  any 
authority.  I  can  see  no  farther  through  stone 
walls  than  can  my  fellow,  and  I  enjoy  no  special 
revelations  from  any  superhuman  realm.  But 
I  ask  you,  as  thoughtful  people,  to  consider 
what  your  ordinary  life,  as  rational  beings, 
implies  as  its  basis  and  as  its  truth. 

What  I  was  expounding  at  the  close  of  my 
last  lecture  was  a  view  of  things  which  seems 
to  me  to  be  implied  in  any  attempt  to  express, 
in  a  reasonable  way,  where  we  stand  in  our 
universe. 

We  all  of  us  have  to  admit,  I  think,  that  our 
daily  life  depends  upon  believing  in  realities 
which  are,  in  any  case,  just  as  truly  beyond 
the  scope  of  our  ordinary  individual  experience 
as  any  spiritual  realm  could  possibly  be.  We 
live  by  believing  in  one  another's  minds  as 
realities.  We  give  credit  to  countless  reports, 
documents,    and    other   evidences   of   present 

360 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

and  past  facts ;  and  we  do  all  this,  knowing 
that  such  credit  cannot  be  adequately  verified 
by  any  experience  such  as  an  individual  man 
can  obtain.  Now,  the  usual  traditional  ac- 
count of  all  these  beliefs  of  ours  is  that  they 
are  forced  upon  us,  by  some  reality  which  is, 
as  people  say,  wholly  independent  of  our 
knowledge,  which  exists  by  itself  apart  from 
our  experience,  and  which  may  be,  therefore, 
entirely  alien  in  its  nature  to  any  of  our  human 
interests  and  ideals. 

But  modern  philosophy,  —  a  philosophy  in 
whose  historical  course  of  development  our 
recent  pragmatism  is  only  a  passing  incident, — 
that  philosophy  which  turns  upon  analyzing  the 
bases  of  our  knowledge,  and  upon  reflectively 
considering  what  our  human  beliefs  and  ideas 
are  intended  to  mean  and  to  accomplish, 
has  taught  us  to  see  that  we  can  never  deal  with 
any  wholly  independent  reality.  The  recent 
pragmatists,  as  I  understand  them,  are  here 
in  full  and  conscious  agreement  with  my  own 
opinion.  We  can  deal  with  no  world  which  is 
out  of  relation  to  our  experience.     On  the  con- 

361 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

trary,  the  real  world  is  known  to  us  in  terms 
of  our  experience,  is  defined  for  us  by  our 
ideas,  and  is  the  object  of  our  practical  endeav- 
ors. Meanwhile,  to  declare  anything  real 
is  to  assert  that  it  has  its  place  in  some  realm 
of  experience,  be  this  experience  human  or 
superhuman.  To  declare  that  anything  what- 
ever is  a  fact,  is  simply  to  assert  that  some  prop- 
osition, which  you  or  I  or  some  other  think- 
ing being  can  express  in  the  form  of  intelligible 
ideas,  is  a  true  proposition.  And  the  truth 
of  propositions  itself  is  nothing  dead,  is 
nothing  independent  of  ideas  and  of  expe- 
rience, but  is  simply  the  successful  fulfilment 
of  some  demand,  —  a  demand  which  you  can 
express  in  the  form  of  an  assertion,  and  which 
is  fulfilled  in  so  far,  and  only  in  so  far,  as  some 
region  of  live  experience  contains  what  meets 
that  demand.  Meanwhile,  every  proposition, 
every  assertion  that  anybody  can  make,  is  a 
deed;  and  every  rational  deed  involves,  in 
effect,  an  assertion  of  a  fact.  If  the  prodigal 
son  says,  "I  will  arise  and  go  to  my  father," 
he  even  thereby  asserts  something  to  be  true 

362 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

about  himself,  his  father,  and  his  father's 
house.  If  an  astronomer  or  a  chemist  or  a 
statistician  or  a  man  of  business  reports  "this 
or  this  is  a  fact,"  he  even  thereby  performs  a 
deed,  —  an  act  having  an  ideal  meaning,  and 
embodying  a  live  purpose;  and  he  further 
declares  that  the  constitution  of  experience  is 
such  as  to  make  this  deed  essentially  reason- 
able, successful,  and  worthy  to  be  accepted 
by  every  man. 

The  real  world  is  therefore  not  something 
independent  of  us.  It  is  a  world  whose  stuff, 
so  to  speak, — whose  content, — is  of  the  nature 
of  experience,  whose  structure  meets,  validates, 
and  gives  warrant  to  our  active  deeds,  and 
whose  whole  nature  is  such  that  it  can  be  inter- 
preted in  terms  of  ideas,  propositions,  and 
conscious  meanings,  while  in  turn  it  gives  to 
our  fragmentary  ideas  and  to  our  conscious 
life  whatever  connected  meaning  they  possess. 
Whenever  I  have  purposes  and  fail,  so  far, 
to  carry  them  out,  that  is  because  I  have  not 
yet  found  the  true  way  of  expressing  my  own 
relation  to  reality.     On  the  other  hand,  pre- 

363 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

cisely  in  so  far  as  I  have  understood  some 
whole  of  reality,  I  have  carried  out  successfully 
some  purpose  of  mine. 

There  is,  then,  no  merely  theoretical  truth, 
and  there-  is  no  reality  foreign,  in  its  nature, 
to  experience.  Whoever  actually  lives  the 
whole  conscious  life  such  as  can  be  lived  out 
with  a  definitely  reasonable  meaning,  —  such 
a  being,  obviously  superhuman  in  his  grade  of 
consciousness,  not  only  knows  the  real  world, 
but  is  the  real  world.  Whoever  is  conscious 
of  the  whole  content  of  experience  possesses 
all  reality.  And  our  search  for  reality  is 
simply  an  effort  to  discover  what  the  whole 
fabric  of  experience  is  into  which  our  human 
experience  is  woven,  what  the  system  of  truth 
is  in  which  our  partial  truths  have  their  place, 
what  the  ideally  significant  life  is  for  the  sake 
of  which  every  deed  of  ours  is  undertaken. 
When  we  try  to  find  out  what  the  real  world  is, 
we  are  simply  trying  to  discover  the  sense  of 
our  own  individual  lives.  And  we  can  define 
that  sense  of  our  lives  only  in  terms  of  a  con- 
scious life  in  which  ours  is  included,  in  which 

364 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

our  ideas  get  their  full  meaning  expressed,  and 
in  which  what  we  fail  to  carry  out  to  the  full 
is  carried  out  to  the  full. 

Ill 

Otherwise  stated,  when  I  think  of  the  whole 
world  of  facts,  —  the  "real  world,"  —  I  inevi- 
tably think  of  something  that  is  my  own  world, 
precisely  in  so  far  as  that  world  is  any  object 
of  any  reasonable  idea  of  mine.  It  is  true,  of 
course,  that,  in  forming  an  idea  of  my  world  of 
facts,  I  do  not  thereby  give  myself,  at  this  in- 
stant, the  least  right  to  spin  out  of  my  inner 
consciousness  any  adequate  present  ideas  of 
the  detail  of  the  contents  of  my  real  world. 
In  thinking  of  the  real  world,  I  am  indeed  think- 
ing of  the  whole  of  that  very  system  of  expe- 
rience in  which  my  experience  is  bound  up, 
and  in  which  I,  as  an  individual,  have  my 
very  limited  and  narrow  place.  But  just  now 
I  am  not  in  possession  of  that  whole.  I  have 
to  work  for  it  and  wait  for  it,  and  faithfully  to 
be  true  to  it.  As  a  creature  living  along,  from 
moment  to  moment,  in  time,  I  therefore  indeed 

365 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

have  to  wait  ignorantly  enough  for  coming 
experience.  I  have  to  use  as  I  can  my  fallible 
memory  in  trying  to  find  out  about  my  own 
past  experience.  I  have  no  way  of  verifying 
what  your  experience  is,  except  by  using  tests 
—  and  again  the  extremely  fallible  tests  — 
which  we  all  employ  in  our  social  life.  I  need 
the  methods  of  the  sciences  of  experience  to 
guide  me  in  the  study  of  whatever  facts  fall 
within  their  scope.  I  use  those  practical  and 
momentary  successes  upon  which  recent  prag- 
matism insists,  whenever  I  try  to  get  a  concrete 
verification  of  my  opinions.  And  so  far  I 
stand,  and  must  rightly  stand,  exactly  where 
any  man  of  common  sense,  any  student  of  a 
science,  any  plain  man,  or  any  learned  man 
stands.  I  am  a  fallible  mortal,  simply  trying 
to  find  my  way  as  I  can  in  the  thickets  of  ex- 
perience. 

And  yet  all  this  my  daily  life,  my  poor  efforts 
to  remember  and  to  predict,  my  fragmentary 
inquiries  into  this  or  that  matter  of  science  or 
of  business,  my  practical  acknowledgment 
of   your   presence   as   real   facts   in   the   real 

366 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

world  of  experience,  my  personal  definition 
of  the  causes  to  which  I  devote  myself,  —  these 
are  all  undertakings  that  are  overruled,  and 
that  are  rendered  significant,  simply  in  so  far 
as  they  are  reasonable  parts  of  one  all-embrac- 
ing enterprise.  This  enterprise  is  my  active 
attempt  to  find  out  my  true  place  in  the  real 
world.  But  now  I  can  only  define  my  real 
world  by  conceiving  it  in  terms  of  experience. 
I  can  find  my  place  in  the  world  only  by  dis- 
covering where  I  stand  in  the  whole  system 
of  experience.  For  what  I  mean  by  a  fact 
is  something  that  somebody  finds.  Even  a 
merely  possible  fact  is  something  only  in  so 
far  as  somebody  actually  could  find  it.  And 
the  sense  in  which  it  is  an  actual  fact  that 
somebody  could  find  in  his  experience  a  de- 
terminate fact,  is  a  sense  which  again  can  only 
be  defined  in  terms  of  concrete,  living,  and  not 
merely  possible  experience,  and  in  terms  of 
some  will  or  purpose  expressed  in  a  con- 
scious life.  Even  possible  facts,  then,  are 
really  possible  only  in  so  far  as  something  is 
actually  experienced,   or  is  found  by  some- 

367 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

body.  Whatever  is  real,  then,  be  it  distant  or 
near,  past  or  future,  present  to  your  mind  or 
to  mine,  a  physical  fact  or  a  moral  fact,  a  fact 
of  our  possible  human  experience,  or  a  fact  of 
a  superhuman  type  of  experience,  a  purpose, 
a  desire,  a  natural  object  or  an  ideal  object,  a 
mechanical  system  or  a  value,  —  whatever,  I 
say,  is  real,  is  real  as  a  content  present  to  some 
conscious  being.  Therefore,  when  I  inquire 
about  the  real  world,  I  am  simply  asking  what 
contents  of  experience,  human  or  superhuman, 
are  actually  and  consciously  found  by  some- 
body. My  inquiries  regarding  facts,  of  what- 
ever grade  the  facts  may  be,  are  therefore 
inevitably  an  effort  to  find  out  what  the 
world's  experience  is.  In  all  my  common 
sense,  then,  in  all  my  science,  in  all  my  social 
life,  I  am  trying  to  discover  what  the  universal 
conscious  life  which  constitutes  the  world  con- 
tains as  its  contents,  and  views  as  its  own. 

But  even  this  is  not  the  entire  story  of  my 
place  in  the  real  world.  For  I  cannot  inquire 
about  facts  without  forming  my  own  ideas 
of  these  facts.     In  so  far  as  my  ideas  are  true, 

368 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

my  own  personal  ideas  are  therefore  active 
processes  that  go  on  within  the  conscious  life 
of  the  world.  If  my  ideas  are  true,  they 
succeed  in  agreeing  with  the  very  world  con- 
sciousness that  they  define.  But  this  agree- 
ment, this  success,  if  itself  it  is  a  fact  at  all, 
is  once  more  a  fact  of  experience,  —  yet  not 
merely  of  my  private  experience,  since  I 
myself  never  personally  find,  within  the  limits 
of  my  own  individual  experience,  the  success 
that  every  act  of  truth  seeking  demands.  If 
I  get  the  truth,  then,  at  any  point  of  my  life, 
my  success  is  real  only  in  so  far  as  some  con- 
scious life,  which  includes  my  ideas  and  my 
efforts,  and  which  also  includes  the  very  facts 
of  the  world  whereof  I  am  thinking,  actually 
observes  my  success,  in  the  form  of  a  conspec- 
tus of  the  world's  facts,  and  of  my  own  efforts 
to  find  and  to  define  them. 

In  so  far,  then,  as  I  get  the  truth  about  the 
world,  I  myself  am  a  fragmentary  conscious 
life  that  is  included  within  the  conscious  con- 
spectus of  the  world's  experience,  and  that  is 
in  one   self-conscious   unity  with   that  world 

2  b  369 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

consciousness.  And  it  is  in  this  unity  with 
the  world  consciousness  that  I  get  my  success, 
and  am  in  concord  with  the  truth. 

But  of  course  any  particular  idea  of  mine, 
regarding  the  world,  or  regarding  any  fact  in 
the  world,  may  be  false.  However,  this  pos- 
sibility of  my  error  is  itself  a  real  situation  of 
mine,  and  involves  essentially  the  same  rela- 
tion between  the  world  and  myself  which 
obtains  in  case  I  have  true  ideas.  For  I  can 
be  in  error  about  an  object  only  in  case  I 
really  mean  to  agree  with  that  object,  and  to 
agree  with  it  in  a  way  which  only  my  own 
purposes,  in  seeking  this  agreement,  can  pos- 
sibly define.  It  is  only  by  virtue  of  my  own 
undertakings  that  I  can  fail  in  my  un- 
dertakings. It  is  only  because,  after  all,  I 
am  loyal  to  the  world's  whole  truth  that  I 
can  so  express  myself  in  fallible  ideas,  and  in 
fragmentary  opinions  that,  as  a  fact,  I  may, 
at  any  moment,  undertake  too  much  for  my 
own  momentary  success  to  be  assured,  so  that 
I  can  indeed  in  any  one  of  my  assertions  fail 
justly  to  accord  with  that  world  consciousness 

370 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

which  I  am  all  the  while  trying  to  interpret 
in  my  own  transient  way.  But  when  I  thus 
fail,  I  momentarily  fail  to  interpret  my  place  in 
the  very  world  consciousness  whose  life  I  am 
trying  to  define.  But  my  failure,  when  and 
in  so  far  as  it  occurs,  is  once  more  a  fact,  — 
and  therefore  a  fact  for  the  world's  con- 
sciousness. If  I  blunder,  but  am  sincere,  if  I 
think  myself  right,  but  am  not  right,  then  my 
error  is  a  fact  for  a  consciousness  which  in- 
cludes my  fallible  attempts  to  be  loyal  to  the 
truth,  but  which  sees  how  they  just  now  lose 
present  touch  with  their  true  cause.  Seeing 
this  my  momentary  defeat,  the  world  con- 
sciousness sees,  however,  my  loyalty,  and  in  its 
conspectus  assigns,  even  to  my  fragmentary 
attempts  at  truth,  their  genuine  place  in  the 
single  unity  of  the  world's  consciousness.  My 
very  failure,  then,  like  every  loyal  failure,  is 
still  a  sort  of  success.  It  is  an  effort  to  define 
my  place  in  the  unity  of  the  world's  conspec- 
tus of  all  conscious  life.  I  cannot  fall  out  of 
that  unity.  I  cannot  flee  from  its  presence. 
And  I  err  only  as  the  loyal  may  give  up  their 

371 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

life  for  their  cause.  Whether  I  get  truth, 
then,  or  whether  I  err  in  detail,  my  loyal 
search  for  truth  insures  the  fact  that  I  am  in 
a  significant  unity  with  the  world's  conscious 
life. 

The  thesis  that  the  world  is  one  whole  and 
a  significant  whole  of  conscious  life  is,  for 
these  reasons,  a  thesis  which  can  only  be 
viewed  as  an  error,  by  reinstating  this  very 
assertion  under  a  new  form.  For  any  error 
of  mine  concerning  the  world  is  possible  only 
in  so  far  as  I  really  mean  to  assert  the  truth 
about  the  world;  and  this  real  meaning  of 
mine  can  exist  only  as  a  fact  within  the 
conspectus  of  consciousness  for  which  the 
real  whole  world  exists,  and  within  which  I 
myself  live. 

This,  then,  in  brief,  is  my  own  theory  of 
truth.  This  is  why  I  hold  this  theory  to  be 
no  fantastic  guess  about  what  may  be  true, 
but  a  logically  inevitable  conclusion  about 
how  every  one  of  us,  wise  or  ignorant,  is  ac- 
tually defining  his  own  relation  to  truth, 
whether  he  knows  the  fact  or  not.       I  ex- 

372 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

pressed  my  theory  at  the  last  time  in  terms  of 
a  polemic  against  the  recent  pragmatists ;  but 
as  a  fact  their  view,  in  its  genuine  and  deeper 
meaning,  is  no  more  opposed  to  mine  than 
my  young  Russian's  vehement  protest  against 
loyalty,  quoted  in  my  second  lecture,  was,  in 
its  true  spirit,  opposed  to  my  own  view.  My 
young  Russian,  you  may  remember,  hated 
what  he  took  to  be  loyalty,  just  because  he 
was  so  loyal.  And  even  so  my  friends,  the 
recent  pragmatists,  reassert  my  theory  of  truth 
even  in  their  every  attempt  to  deny  it.  For, 
amongst  other  things,  they  assert  that  their 
own  theory  of  truth  is  actually  true.  And 
that  assertion  implies  just  such  a  conspectus 
of  all  truth  in  one  view,  —  just  such  a  con- 
spectus as  I  too  assert. 

IV 

We  first  came  in  sight  of  this  theory  of 
truth,  in  these  discussions,  for  a  purely  prac- 
tical reason.  Abstract  and  coldly  intellectual 
as  the  doctrine,  when  stated  as  I  have  just 
stated   it,  may  appear,  we   had  our  need  to 

373 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

ask  what  truth  is,  because  we  wanted  to  know 
whether  the  loyal  are  right  in  supposing,  as 
they  inevitably  do  suppose,  that  their  per- 
sonal causes,  and  that  their  cause  of  causes, 
namely,  universal  loyalty,  that  any  such 
causes,  I  say,  possess  genuine  foundation  in 
truth.  Loyalty,  as  we  found,  is  a  practical  ser- 
vice of  superhuman  objects.  For  our  causes 
transcend  expression  in  terms  of  our  single 
lives.  If  the  cause  lives,  then  all  conscious  moral 
life — even  our  poor  human  life — is  in  unity 
with  a  superhuman  conscious  life,  in  which 
we  ourselves  dwell ;  and  in  ti  is  unity  we  win,  in 
so  far  as  we  are  loyal  servants  of  our  cause,  a 
success  which  no  transient  human  experience 
of  ours,  no  joyous  thrill  of  the  flying  moment, 
no  bitterness  of  private  defeat  and  loss,  can 
do  more  or  less  than  to  illustrate,  to  illumine, 
or  to  idealize. 

We  asked:  Is  this  faith  of  the  loyal  in 
their  causes  a  pathetic  fallacy  ?  Our  theory 
of  truth  has  given  us  a  general  answer  to 
this  intensely  practical  question.  The  loyal 
try  to   live  in  the    spirit.     But,  if   thereupon 

374 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

they  merely  open  their  eyes  to  the  nature 
of  the  reasonable  truth,  they  see  that  it  is  in 
the  spirit  only  that  they  do  or  can  live.  They 
would  be  living  in  this  truth,  as  mere  passing 
fragments  of  conscious  life,  as  mere  blind 
series  of  mental  processes,  even  if  they  were 
not  loyal.  For  all  life,  however  dark  and  frag- 
mentary, is  either  a  blind  striving  for  con- 
scious unity  with  the  universal  life  of  which 
it  is  a  fragment,  or  else,  like  the  life  of  the 
loyal,  is  a  deliberate  effort  to  express  such  a 
striving  in  the  form  of  a  service  of  a  super- 
human cause.  And  all  lesser  loyalties,  and 
all  serving  of  imperfect  or  of  evil  causes,  are 
but  fragmentary  forms  of  the  service  of  the 
cause  of  universal  loyalty.  To  serve  uni- 
versal loyalty  is,  however,  to  view  the  interests 
of  all  conscious  life  as  one;  and  to  do  this  is 
to  regard  all  conscious  life  as  constituting  just 
such  an  unity  as  our  theory  of  truth  requires. 
Meanwhile,  since  truth  seeking  is  indeed  it- 
self a  practical  activity,  what  we  have  stated 
in  our  theory  of  truth  is  itself  but  an  aspect 
of  the  very  life  that  the  loyal   are  leading. 

375 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  LOYALTY 

Whoever  seeks  any  truth  is  loyal,  for  he  is 
determining  his  life  by  reference  to  a  life  which 
transcends  his  own.  And  he  is  loyal  to  loy- 
alty; for  whatever  truth  you  try  to  discover 
is,  if  true,  valid  for  everybody,  and  is  there- 
fore worthy  of  everybody's  loyal  recognition. 
The  loyal,  then,  are  truth  seekers;  and  the 
truth  seekers  are  loyal.  And  all  of  them  live 
for  the  sake  of  the  unity  of  all  life.  And  this 
unity  includes  us  all,  but  is  superhuman. 

Our  view  of  truth,  therefore,  meets  at  once 
an  ethical  and  a  logical  need.  The  real 
world  is  precisely  that  world  in  which  the  loyal 
are  at  home.  Their  loyalty  is  no  pathetic 
fallacy.  Their  causes  are  real  facts  in  the 
universe.  The  universe  as  a  whole  possesses 
that  unity  which  loyalty  to  loyalty  seeks  to 
express  in  its  service  of  the  whole  of  life. 

Herewith,  however,  it  occurs  to  us  to  ask 
one  final  question.  Is  not  this  real  world, 
whose  true  unity  the  loyal  acknowledge  by 
their  every  deed,  and  whose  conscious  unity 
every  process  of  truth  seeking  presupposes,  — 
is   not   this    also    the    world    which   religion 

376 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

recognizes?     If  so,   what   is   the   relation   of 
loyalty  to  religion  ? 

The  materials  for  answering  this  question 
are  now  in  our  hands.  We  have  been  so 
deliberate  in  preparing  them  for  our  present 
purpose,  just  for  the  sake  of  making  our 
answer  the  simpler  when  it  comes. 


We  have  now  defined  loyalty  as  the  will  to 
manifest  the  eternal  in  and  through  the  deeds 
of  individual  selves.  As  for  religion,  —  in 
its  highest  historical  forms  (which  here  alone 
concern  us),  —  religion,  as  I  think,  may  be  de- 
fined as  follows.  Religion  (in  these  its  high- 
est forms)  is  the  interpretation  both  of  the 
eternal  and  of  the  spirit  of  loyalty  through 
emotion,  and  through  a  fitting  activity  of  the 
imagination. 

Religion,  in  any  form,  has  always  been  an 
effort  to  interpret  and  to  make  use  of  some 
superhuman  world.  The  history,  the  genesis, 
the  earlier  and  simpler  forms  of  religion,  the 
relations    of    religion    and    morality    in    the 

377 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

primitive  life  of  mankind,  do  not  here  con- 
cern us.  It  is  enough  to  say  that,  in  history, 
there  has  often  been  a  serious  tension  be- 
tween the  interests  of  religion  and  those  of 
morality.  For  the  higher  powers  have  very 
generally  seemed  to  man  to  be  either  non- 
moral  or  immoral.  This  very  tension,  only 
too  frequently,  still  exists  for  many  people 
to-day.  One  of  the  greatest  and  hardest 
discoveries  of  the  human  mind  has  been  the 
discovery  of  how  to  reconcile,  not  religion 
and  science,  but  religion  and  morality. 
Whoever  knows  even  a  small  portion  of  the 
history  of  the  cults  of  mankind  is  aware  of  the 
difficulties  to  which  I  refer.  The  superhu- 
man has  been  conceived  by  men  in  terms  that 
were  often  far  enough  from  those  which  loy- 
alty requires.  Whoever  will  read  over  the 
recorded  words  of  a  writer  nowadays  too 
much  neglected,  the  rugged  and  magnifi- 
cently loyal  Old  Testament  prophet  Amos, 
can  see  for  himself  how  bravely  the  difficulty 
of  conceiving  the  superhuman  as  the  righteous, 
was  faced  by  one  of  the  first  who  ever  viewed 

378 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

the  relation  of  religion  and  morality  as  our 
best  teachers  have  since  taught  us  to  view 
them.  And  yet  such  a  reader  can  also  see 
how  hard  this  very  task  of  the  prophet  was. 
When  we  remember  also  that  so  great  a  mind 
as  that  of  the  originator  of  Buddhism,  after  all 
the  long  previous  toil  of  Hindoo  thought  upon 
this  great  problem,  could  see  no  way  to  recon- 
cile religion  and  morality,  except  by  bringing 
them  both  to  the  shores  of  the  mysterious  and 
soundless  ocean  of  Nirvana,  and  sinking 
them  together  in  its  depths  (an  undertaking 
which  Buddha  regarded  as  the  salvation  of 
the  world),  we  get  a  further  view  of  the  nature 
of  the  problem.  When  we  remember  that  St. 
Paul,  after  many  years  of  lonely  spiritual 
struggle,  attempted  in  his  teaching  to  recon- 
cile morality  and  religion  by  an  interpretation 
of  Christianity  which  has  ever  since  kept  the 
Christian  world  in  a  most  inspiring  ferment  of 
theological  controversy  and  of  practical  con- 
flict, we  are  again  instructed  as  to  the  serious- 
ness of  the  issue.  But  as  a  fact,  the  experi- 
ence of  the  civilized  man  has  gradually  led  him 

379 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

to  see  how  to  reconcile  the  moral  life  and  the 
religious  spirit.  Since  this  reconciliation  is  one 
which  our  theory  of  truth,  and  of  the  con- 
stitution of  the  real  world,  substantially  jus- 
tifies, we  are  now  ready  for  a  brief  review  of 
the  entire  situation. 

People  often  say  that  mere  morality  is 
something  very  remote  from  true  religion. 
Sometimes  people  say  this  in  the  interests  of 
religion,  meaning  to  point  out  that  mere 
morality  can  at  best  make  you  only  a  more 
or  less  tolerable  citizen,  while  only  religion 
can  reconcile  you,  as  such  people  say,  to  that 
superhuman  world  whose  existence  and  whose 
support  alone  make  human  life  worth  living. 
But  sometimes  almost  the  same  assertion  is 
made  in  the  interest  of  pure  morality,  viewed 
as  something  independent  of  religion.  Some 
people  tell  you,  namely,  that  since,  as  they 
say,  religion  is  a  collection  of  doubtful  beliefs, 
of  superstitions,  and  of  morex  or  less  exalted 
emotions,  morality  is  all  the  better  for  keep- 
ing aloof  from  religion.  Suffering  man  needs 
your  help ;   your  friends  need  as  much  happi- 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

ness  as  you  can  give  them;  conventional 
morality  is,  on  the  whole,  a  good  thing.  Learn 
righteousness,  therefore,  say  they,  and  leave 
religion  to  the  fantastic-minded  who  love  to 
believe.  The  human  is  what  we  need.  Let  the 
superhuman  alone. 

Now,  our  philosophy  of  loyalty,  aiming  at 
something  much  larger  and  richer  than  the 
mere  sum  of  human  happiness  in  individual 
men,  has  taught  us  that  there  is  no  such 
sharp  dividing  line  between  the  human  and 
the  superhuman  as  these  attempts  to  sunder 
the  provinces  of  religion  and  morality  would 
imply.  The  loyal  serve  something  more  than 
individual  lives.  Even  Nietzsche,  individu- 
alist and  ethical  naturalist  though  he  was, 
illustrates  our  present  thesis.  He  began  the 
later  period  of  his  teaching  by  asserting  that 
"God  is  dead";  and  (lest  one  might  regard 
this  as  a  mere  attack  upon  monotheism,  and 
might  suppose  Nietzsche  to  be  an  old-fash- 
ioned heathen  polytheist)  he  added  the  fa- 
mous remark  that,  in  case  any  gods  whatever 
existed,  he  could  not  possibly  endure  being 

381 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

himself  no  god.  "  Therefore,"  so  he  rea- 
soned, "there  are  no  gods"  All  this  seems 
to  leave  man  very  much  to  his  own  devices. 
Yet  Nietzsche  at  once  set  up  the  cult  of  the 
ideal  future  being  called  the  Uebermensch  or 
Superman.  And  the  Uebermensch  is  just  as 
much  of  a  god  as  anybody  who  ever  throned 
upon  Olympus  or  dwelt  in  the  sky.  And  if 
the  doctrine  of  the  "Eternal  Recurrence," 
as  Nietzsche  defined  it,  is  true,  the  Uebermensch 
belongs  not  only  to  the  ideal  future,  but  has 
existed  an  endless  number  of  times  already. 

If  our  philosophy  of  loyalty  is  right,  Nietz- 
sche was  not  wrong  in  this  appeal  to  the 
superhuman.  The  superhuman  we  indeed 
have  always  with  us.  Life  has  no  sense 
without  it.  But  the  superhuman  need  not 
be  the  magical.  It  need  not  be  the  object  of 
superstition.  And  if  we  are  desirous  of  uni- 
fying the  interests  of  morality  and  religion,  it 
is  well  indeed  to  begin,  as  rugged  old  Amos 
began,  by  first  appreciating  what  righteous- 
ness is,  and  then  by  interpreting  righteous- 
ness, in  a  perfectly  reasonable  and  non-super- 

382 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

stitious  way,  in  superhuman  terms.  Then 
we  shall  be  ready  to  appreciate  what  religion, 
whose  roots  are  indeed  by  no  means  wholly  in 
our  moral  nature,  nevertheless  has  to  offer  us 
as  a  supplement  to  our  morality. 

VI 

Loyalty  is  a  service  of  causes.  But,  as  we 
saw,  we  do  not,  we  cannot,  wait  until  some- 
body clearly  shows  us  how  good  the  causes 
are  in  themselves,  before  we  set  about  serving 
them.  We  first  practically  learn  of  the  good- 
ness of  our  causes  through  the  very  act  of 
serving  them.  Loyalty  begins,  then,  in  all  of 
us,  in  elemental  forms.  A  cause  fascinates 
us  —  we  at  first  know  not  clearly  why.  We 
give  ourselves  willingly  to  that  cause.  Here- 
with our  true  life  begins.  The  cause  may 
indeed  be  a  bad  one.  But  at  worst  it  is  our 
way  of  interpreting  the  true  cause.  If  we 
let  our  loyalty  develop,  it  tends  to  turn  into 
the  service  of  the  universal  cause.  Hence  I 
deliberately  declined,  in  this  discussion,  to 
base  my  theory  of  loyalty  upon  that  meta- 

383 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

physical  doctrine  which  I  postponed  to  my 
latest  lectures.  It  is  a  very  imperfect  view 
of  the  real  world  which  most  youth  get  before 
them  before  they  begin  to  be  loyal.  Hosts 
of  the  loyal  actually  manifest  the  eternal  in 
their  deeds,  and  know  not  that  they  do  so. 
They  only  know  that  they  are  given  over  to 
their  cause.  The  first  good  of  loyalty  lies, 
then,  in  the  fact  which  we  emphasized  in  our 
earlier  lectures.  Reverberating  all  through 
you,  stirring  you  to  your  depths,  loyalty  first 
unifies  your  plan  of  life,  and  thereby  gives 
you  what  nothing  else  can  give,  —  your  self 
as  a  life  lived  in  accordance  with  a  plan,  your 
conscience  as  your  plan  interpreted  for  you 
through  your  ideal,  your  cause  expressed  as 
your  personal  purpose  in  living. 

In  so  far,  then,  one  can  indeed  be  loyal 
without  being  consciously  and  explicitly  reli- 
gious. One's  cause,  in  its  first  intention, 
appears  to  him  human,  concrete,  practical. 
It  is  also  an  ideal.  It  is  also  a  superhuman 
entity.  It  also  really  means  the  service  of 
the  eternal.     But  this  fact  may  be,  to  the  hard- 

384 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

working,  and  especially  to  the  unimaginative, 
and,  in  a  worldly  sense,  fairly  successful  man, 
a  latent  fact.  He  then,  to  be  sure,  gradually 
idealizes  his  cause  as  he  goes;  but  this  ideal- 
izing in  so  far  becomes  no  very  explicitly 
emphasized  process  in  his  life,  although,  as 
we  have  seen,  some  tendency  to  deify  the 
cause  is  inevitable. 

Meanwhile,  such  an  imperfectly  developed 
but  loyal  man  may  also  accept,  upon  tradi- 
tional grounds,  a  religion.  This  religion  will 
then  tell  him  about  a  superhuman  world. 
But  in  so  far  the  religion  need  not  be,  to  his 
mind,  an  essential  factor  in  his  practical  loy- 
alty. He  may  be  superstitious;  or  he  may 
be  a  religious  formalist;  or  he  may  accept 
his  creed  and  his  church  simply  because  of 
their  social  respectability  and  usefulness;  or, 
finally,  he  may  even  have  a  rich  and  genuine 
religious  experience,  which  still  may  remain 
rather  a  mysticism  than  a  morality,  or  an 
aesthetic  comfort  rather  than  a  love  of  his 
cause. 

In  such  cases,  loyalty  and  religion  may  long 

2c  385 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

keep  apart.  But  the  fact  remains  that  loy- 
alty, if  sincere,  involves  at  least  a  latent  belief 
in  the  superhuman  reality  of  the  cause,  and 
means  at  least  an  unconscious  devotion  to  the 
one  and  eternal  cause.  But  such  a  belief  is 
also  a  latent  union  of  morality  and  religion. 
Such  a  service  is  an  unconscious  piety.  The 
time  may  come,  then,  when  the  morality  will 
consciously  need  this  union  with  the  religious 
creed  of  the  individual  whose  growth  we  are 
portraying. 

This  union  must  begin  to  become  an  ex- 
plicit union  whenever  that  process  which,  in 
our  sixth  lecture,  we  called  the  idealizing  of 
the  cause,  reaches  its  higher  levels.  We  saw 
that  those  higher  levels  are  reached  in  the 
presence  of  what  seems  to  be,  to  human 
vision,  a  lost  cause.  If  we  believe  in  the  lost 
cause,  we  become  directly  aware  that  we  are 
indeed  seeking  a  city  out  of  sight.  If  such  a 
cause  is  real,  it  belongs  to  a  superhuman 
world.  Now,  every  cause  worthy,  as  we  said, 
of  lifelong  service,  and  capable  of  unifying 
our  life  plans,  shows  sooner  or  later  that  it  is 

386 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

a  cause  which  we  cannot  successfully  express 
in  any  set  of  human  experiences  of  transient 
joys  and  of  crumbling  successes.  Human  life 
taken  merely  as  it  flows,  viewed  merely  as  it 
passes  by  in  time  and  is  gone,  is  indeed  a  lost 
river  of  experience  that  plunges  down  the 
mountains  of  youth  and  sinks  in  the  deserts 
of  age.  Its  significance  comes  solely  through 
its  relations  to  the  air  and  the  ocean  and  the 
great  deeps  of  universal  experience.  For  by 
such  poor  figures  I  may,  in  passing,  symbolize 
that  really  rational  relation  of  our  personal 
experience  to  universal  conscious  experience, 
—  that  relation  to  which  I  have  devoted  these 
last  two  lectures. 

Everybody  ought  to  serve  the  universal 
cause  in  his  own  individual  way.  For  this, 
as  we  have  seen,  is  what  loyalty,  when  it  comes 
to  know  its  own  mind,  really  means.  But 
whoever  thus  serves  inevitably  loses  his  cause 
in  our  poor  world  of  human  sense-experience, 
because  his  cause  is  too  good  for  this  present 
temporal  world  to  express  it.  And  that  is, 
after  all,  what  the  old  theology  meant  when  it 

387 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

called  you  and  me,  as  we  now  naturally  are, 
lost  beings.  Our  deepest  loyalty  lies  in  devot- 
ing ourselves  to  causes  that  are  just  now  lost 
to  our  poor  human  nature.  One  can  express 
this,  of  course,  by  saying  that  the  true  cause 
is  indeed  real  enough,  in  the  higher  world, 
while  it  is  our  poor  human  nature  which  is 
lost.  Both  ways  of  viewing  the  case  have 
their  truth.  Loyalty  means  a  transformation 
of  our  nature. 

Lost  causes,  then,  we  must  serve.  But  as 
we  have  seen,  in  our  sixth  lecture,  loyalty  to  a 
lost  cause  has  two  companions,  grief  and  imag- 
ination. Now,  these  two  are  the  parents  of  all 
the  higher  forms  of  genuinely  ethical  religion. 
If  you  doubt  the  fact,  read  the  scriptures  of 
any  of  the  great  ethical  faiths.  Consult  the 
psalter,  the  hymns,  the  devotional  books,  or 
the  prayers  of  the  church.  Such  religion 
interprets  the  superhuman  in  forms  that  our 
longing,  our  grief,  and  our  imagination  in- 
vent, but  also  in  terms  that  are  intended  to 
meet  the  demands  of  our  highest  loyalty. 
^or  we  are  loyal  to  that  unity  of  life  which, 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

as  our  truer  moral  consciousness  learns  to 
believe,  owns  the  whole  real  world,  and  con- 
stitutes the  cause  of  causes.  In  being  loyal 
to  universal  loyalty,  we  are  serving  the  unity 
of  life. 

This  true  unity  of  the  world-life,  however, 
is  at  once  very  near  to  us  and  very  far  from 
us.  Very  near  it  is;  for  we  have  our  being 
in  it,  and  depend  upon  it  for  whatever  worth 
we  have.  Apart  from  it  we  are  but  the  gur- 
gling stream  soon  to  be  lost  in  the  desert.  In 
union  with  it  we  have  individual  significance 
in  and  for  the  whole.  But  we  are  very  far 
from  it  also,  because  our  human  experience 
throws  such  fragmentary  light  upon  the  de- 
tails of  our  relation  to  its  activities.  Hence  in 
order  to  feel  our  relations  to  it  as  vital  relations, 
we  have  to  bring  it  near  to  our  feelings  and 
to  our  imaginations.  And  we  long  and  suffer 
the  loneliness  of  this  life  as  we  do  so.  But 
because  we  know  of  the  details  of  the  world 
only  through  our  empirical  sciences,  while 
these  give  us  rather  materials  for  a  rational 
life  than  a  view  of  the  unity  of  life,  we  are 

389 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

indeed  left  to  our  imagination  to  assuage 
grief  and  to  help  in  the  training  of  loyalty. 
For  here,  that  is,  precisely  as  to  the  details  of 
the  system  of  facts  whereby  our  life  is  linked 
to  the  eternal,  our  science  forsakes  us.  We 
can  know  that  we  are  thus  linked.  How  we 
are  linked,  our  sciences  do  not  make  manifest 
to  us. 

Hence  the  actual  content  of  the  higher 
ethical  religions  is  endlessly  rich  in  legend 
and  in  other  symbolic  portrayal.  This  por- 
trayal is  rich  in  emotional  meaning  and  in 
vivid  detail.  What  this  portrayal  attempts 
to  characterize  is,  in  its  general  outline,  an 
absolute  truth.  This  truth  consists  in  the 
following  facts:  First,  the  rational  unity  and 
goodness  of  the  world-life;  next,  its  true  but 
invisible  nearness  to  us,  despite  our  ignorance; 
further,  its  fulness  of  meaning  despite  our 
barrenness  of  present  experience;  and  yet 
more,  its  interest  in  our  personal  destiny  as 
moral  beings;  and  finally,  the  certainty  that, 
through  our  actual  human  loyalty,  we  come, 
like  Moses,  face  to  face  with  the  true  will  of 

390 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

the  world,  as  a  man  speaks  to  his  friend.  In 
recognizing  these  facts,  we  have  before  us 
what  may  be  called  the  creed  of  the  Abso- 
lute Religion. 

You  may  well  ask,  of  course,  whether  our 
theory  of  truth,  as  heretofore  expounded,  gives 
any  warrant  to  such  religious  convictions.  I 
hold  that  it  does  give  warrant  to  them.  The 
symbols  in  which  these  truths  are  expressed  by 
one  or  another  religion  are  indeed  due  to  all 
sorts  of  historical  accidents,  and  to  the  most 
varied  play  of  the  imaginations  both  of  the 
peoples  and  of  the  religious  geniuses  of  our 
race.  But  that  our  relations  to  the  world-life 
are  relations  wherein  we  are  consciously  met, 
from  the  other  side,  by  a  superhuman  and 
yet  strictly  personal  conscious  life,  in  which 
our  own  personalities  are  themselves  bound 
up,  but  which  also  is  not  only  richer  but  is 
more  concrete  and  definitely  conscious  and 
real  than  we  are,  —  this  seems  to  me  to  be  an 
inevitable  corollary  of  my  theory  of  truth. 


3frl 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF    LOYALTY 

VII 

And  now,  finally,  to  sum  up  our  whole  doc- 
trine of  loyalty  and  religion.  Two  things 
belonging  to  the  world-life  we  know  —  two 
at  least,  if  my  theory  is  true :  it  is  defined  in 
terms  of  our  own  needs;  and  it  includes  and 
completes  our  experience.  Hence,  in  any  case, 
it  is  precisely  as  live  and  elemental  and  con- 
crete as  we  are;  and  there  is  not  a  need  of 
ours  which  is  not  its  own.  If  you  ask  why  I 
call  it  good  —  well,  the  very  arguments  which 
recent  pragmatism  has  used  are,  as  you  re- 
member, here  my  warrant.  A  truth  cannot 
be  a  merely  theoretical  truth.  True  is  that 
which  successfully  fulfils  an  idea.  Whoever, 
again,  is  not  succeeding,  or  is  facing  an  evil, 
or  is  dissatisfied,  is  inevitably  demanding  and 
defining  facts  that  are  far  beyond  him,  and  that 
are  not  yet  consciously  his  own.  A  knower 
of  the  totality  of  truth  is  therefore,  of  neces- 
sity, in  possession  of  the  fulfilment  of  all 
rational  purposes.  If,  however,  you  ask  why 
this  world-life  permits  any  evil  whatever,  or 

392 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGIOK 

any  finitude,  or  any  imperfections,  I  must  in- 
deed reply  that  here  is  no  place  for  a  general 
discussion  of  the  whole  problem  of  evil,  which 
I  have  repeatedly  and  wearisomely  considered 
in  other  discussions  of  mine.  But  this  obser- 
vation does  belong  here.  Our  theory  of  evil 
is  indeed  no  "shallow  optimism,"  but  is 
founded  upon  the  deepest,  the  bitterest,  and 
the  dearest  moral  experience  of  the  human 
race.  The  loyal,  and  they  alone,  know  the 
one  great  good  of  suffering,  of  ignorance,  of 
finitude,  of  loss,  of  defeat  —  and  that  is  just 
the  good  of  loyalty,  so  long  as  the  cause  itself 
can  only  be  viewed  as  indeed  a  living  whole. 
Spiritual  peace  is  surely  no  easy  thing.  We 
win  that  peace  only  through  stress  and  suffer- 
ing and  loss  and  labor.  But  when  we  find 
the  preciousness  of  the  idealized  cause  empha- 
sized through  grief,  we  see  that,  whatever  evil 
is,  it  at  least  may  have  its  place  in  an  ideal 
order.  What  would  be  the  universe  without 
loyalty;  and  what  would  loyalty  be  without 
trial?  And  when  we  remember  that,  from 
this  point  of  view,  our  own  griefs  are  the  griefs 

393 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

of  the  very  world  consciousness  itself,  in  so 
far  as  this  world-life  is  expressed  in  our  lives, 
it  may  well  occur  to  us  that  the  life  of  loyalty 
with  all  its  griefs  and  burdens  and  cares  may 
be  the  very  foundation  of  the  attainment  of 
that  spiritual  triumph  which  we  must  conceive 
as  realized  by  the  world  spirit. 

Perhaps,  however,  one  weakly  says :  "  If 
the  world  will  attains  in  its  wholeness  what  we 
seek,  why  need  we  seek  that  good  at  all  ?"  I 
answer  at  once  that  our  whole  philosophy  of 
loyalty  instantly  shows  the  vanity  of  such 
speech.  Of  course,  the  world-life  does  not 
obtain  the  individual  good  that  is  involved  in 
my  willing  loyalty  unless  indeed  /  am  loyal. 
The  cause  may  in  some  way  triumph  without 
me,  but  not  as  my  cause.  We  have  never 
defined  our  theory  as  meaning  that  the  world- 
life  is  first  eternally  complete,  but  then  asks  us, 
in  an  indifferent  way,  to  copy  its  perfections. 
Our  view  is  that  each  of  us  who  is  loyal  is 
doing  his  unique  deed  in  that  whole  of  life 
which  we  have  called  the  eternal  simply 
because  it  is  the  conspectus  of  the  totality  of 

394 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

life,  past,  present,  and  future.  If  my  deed 
were  not  done,  the  world-life  would  miss  my 
deed.  Each  of  us  can  say  that.  The  very 
basis  of  our  theory  of  truth,  which  we  found 
upon  the  deeds,  the  ideas,  the  practical  needs, 
of  each  of  us,  gives  every  individual  his  unique 
place  in  the  world  order  —  his  deed  that  no- 
body else  can  do,  his  will  which  is  his  own. 
"Our  wills  are  ours  to  make  them  thine." 
The  unity  of  the  world  is  not  an  ocean  in  which 
we  are  lost,  but  a  life  which  is  and  which 
needs  all  our  lives  in  one.  Our  loyalty  de- 
fines that  unity  for  us  as  a  living,  active  unity. 
We  have  come  to  the  unity  through  the  under- 
standing of  our  loyalty.  It  is  an  eternal  unity 
only  in  so  far  as  it  includes  all  time  and 
change  and  life  and  deeds.  And  therefore, 
when  we  reach  this  view,  since  the  view  simply 
fulfils  what  loyalty  demands,  our  loyalty  re- 
mains as  precious  to  us,  and  as  practical, 
and  as  genuinely  a  service  of  a  cause,  as  it 
was  before.  It  is  no  sort  of  "moral  holiday" 
that  this  whole  world-life  suggests  to  us.  It  is 
precisely  as  a  whole  life  of  ideal  strivings  in 

395 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   LOYALTY 

which  we  have  our  places  as  individual  selves 
and  are  such  selves  only  in  so  far  as  we  strive 
to  do  our  part  in  the  whole,  —  it  is  thus,  and 
thus  only,  that  our  philosophy  of  loyalty 
regards  the  universe. 

Religion,  therefore,  precisely  in  so  far  as  it 
attempts  to  conceive  the  universe  as  a  con- 
scious and  personal  life  of  superhuman  mean- 
ing, and  as  a  life  that  is  in  close  touch  with 
our  own  meaning,  is  eternally  true.  But  now 
it  is  just  this  general  view  of  the  universe  as  a 
rational  order  that  is  indeed  open  to  our 
rational  knowledge.  No  part  of  such  a  doc- 
trine gives  us,  however,  the  present  right  as 
human  beings  to  determine  with  any  certainty 
the  details  of  the  world-life,  except  in  so  far 
as  they  come  within  the  scope  of  our  scien- 
tific and  of  our  social  inquiries.  Hence, 
when  religion,  in  the  service  of  loyalty,  inter- 
prets the  world-life  to  us  with  symbolic  detail, 
it  gives  us  indeed  merely  symbols  of  the  eternal 
truth.  That  this  truth  is  indeed  eternal,  that  \ 
our  loyalty  brings  us  into  personal  relations 
with  a   personal  world-life,  which  values  our 

396 


LOYALTY   AND   RELIGION 

every  loyal  deed,  and  needs  that  deed,  all  this 
is  true  and  rational.  And  just  this  is  what 
religion  rightly  illustrates.  But  the  parables, 
the  symbols,  the  historical  incidents  that  the 
religious  imagination  uses  in  its  portrayals,  — 
these  are  the  more  or  less  sacred  and  transient 
accidents  in  which  the  "real  presence"  of  the 
divine  at  once  shows  itself  to  us,  and  hides  the 
detail  of  its  inner  life  from  us.  These  acci- 
dents of  the  religious  imagination  endure 
through  many  ages ;  but  they  also  vary  from 
place  to  place  and  from  one  nation  or  race  of 
men  to  another,  and  they  ought  to  do  so. 
Whoever  sees  the  living  truth  of  the  personal 
and  conscious  and  ethical  unity  of  the  world 
through  these  symbols  is  possessed  of  the 
absolute  religion,  whatever  be  his  nominal 
creed  or  church.  Whoever  overemphasizes 
the  empirical  details  of  these  symbols,  and 
then  asks  us  to  accept  these  details  as  literally 
true,  commits  an  error  which  seems  to  me 
simply  to  invert  that  error  whereof,  at  the  last 
time,  I  ventured  to  accuse  my  pragmatist 
friends.     Such    a    literalist,    who    reads    his 

397 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  LOYALTY 

symbols  as  revelations  of  the  detailed  structure 
of  the  divine  life,  seems  to  me,  namely,  to  look 
for  the  eternal  within  the  realm  of  the  mere 
data  of  human  sense  and  imagination.  To 
do  this,  I  think,  is  indeed  to  seek  the  risen 
Lord  in  the  open  sepulchre. 

Concerning  the  living  truth  of  the  whole 
conscious  universe,  one  can  well  say,  as  one 
observes  the  special  facts  of  human  sense  and 
imagination:  "He  is  not  here;  he  is  arisen." 
Yet  equally  from  the  whole  circle  of  the  heaven 
of  that  entire  self-conscious  life  which  is  the 
truth,  there  comes  always,  and  to  all  the  loyal, 
the  word:  "Lo,  I  am  with  you  alway,  even 
unto  the  end  of  the  world." 


INDEX 


Abstractions  :  impersonal  ab- 
stractions cannot  be  proper 
objects  of  loyalty,  20,  52. 

Agreement:  with  reality,  in 
relation  to  truth,  316,  322,  324, 
327,  328,  340-346,  360-373. 

Altruism  :  a  mere  fragment  of 
goodness,  218;  relations  of, 
to  benevolence,  to  justice,  and 
to  loyalty,  see  Benevolence 
and  Justice. 

American  Problems  :  problem 
of  family  loyalty,  220-228; 
loyalty  to  the  national  govern- 
ment, 233-236;  the  problem 
of  the  "self-estranged  social 
mind,"  238-244;  provincial- 
ism as  a  means  of  training 
loyalty,  245-248 ;  defective 
loyalty  in  our  national  life, 
217-220;  defective  patriotism, 
233-236;  holidays,  267,  268; 
sport,  265-267.    I 

Ancestral  Tendencies  :  as  basis 
of  our  conflicting  natural  de- 
sires, 27,  28,  31,  57. 

Aristotle  :  26. 

Arnold  von  Winkelried  :  113, 
329. 

Art  and  Loyalty  :  289,  290. 

Augustine,  Saint  :  26. 

Authority  :  of  the  moral  law, 
dependent  for  its  justification 
upon  our  own  rational  will,  25 ; 
individualistic  revolt  against 
authority,  3-6,  33-35,  37,  60, 
65-67,  83,  84,  92-95  ;  decline  of 
family  authority,  220-223  ;  loy- 
alty not  blind  submission  to 
authority,  42,  58,  71-79,  94,  95, 
110,    199,    226;     authority    of 


conscience  defined  and  ex- 
plained, 172-179. 
Autonomy  :  of  the  rational  will, 
principle  of,  as  fundamental 
in  ethics,  24-27 ;  paradox  re- 
garding this  autonomy,  30,  31, 
34-37 ;  loyalty  as  the  solution 
of  the  paradox,  38-42;  au- 
tonomy as  defined  by  some 
forms  of  individualism,  84,  85, 
92 ;  loyalty  as  the  means  of 
securing  moral  autonomy,  95, 
110.  See  also  Self,  Self- 
will,  and  Loyalty. 

Benevolence  :  its  relation  to 
loyalty,  and  to  justice,  15,  144 ; 
definition  of  benevolence,  145; 
apart  from  loyalty  is  senti- 
mentalism,  but  necessarily  at- 
tends loyalty,  160. 

Buddhism  :  influence  of,  upon 
the  Japanese  ideal  of  loyalty, 
73 ;  relation  of  Buddhism  to 
the  historical  conflicts  between 
religious  and  moral  interests, 
379. 

Bushido  :  the  Japanese  concept 
of  loyalty  sketched,  70-76; 
it  is  not  without  individualistic 
features,  72,  73,  74,  76;  is  a 
counter-instance  to  urge  against 
the  partisans  of  false  individual- 
ism, 71,  75;  its  training  of 
serenity  and  self-control,  76 ; 
its  relation  to  patriotism,  235. 

Cash  Value  :  as  a  metaphorical 
expression  for  the  nature  of 
truth,  321-323,  328,  329,  346, 
347. 


INDEX 


Cause  :  the  concept  of  a  cause  to 
which  one  can  be  loyal,  17,  18- 
20;  a  cause  must  involve 
persons,  but  be  also,  in  some 
sense,  super-individual,  20,  51- 
53,  307-313 ;  and  hence,  if  real, 
must  involve  a  superhuman 
spiritual  unity  of  life,  309,  313, 
329,  330,  341,  342,  347,  348, 
354,  355;  the  true  cause 
characterized  as  "the  eternal," 
357;  and  related  to  the  object 
of  the  religious  consciousness, 
377;  all  serving  of  imperfect 
causes  as  fragmentary  forms  of 
the  service  of  the  true  cause, 
375;  the  true  cause  a  reality, 
303-306,  313,  314,  340-346, 
358-373 ;  hence,  also  an  object 
for  religion,  382-391.  The 
cause  for  any  individual  has 
to  be  defined  in  terms  of  his 
personal  choice  and  of  his 
individual  nature,  19,  39-42, 
52-54,  58,  93,  110,  125,  130, 
131,  138,  156,  157,  177,  186, 
187,  226;  and  the  individual 
may  be  loyal  to  an  evil  cause, 
18,  108,  109,  114-118;  but  the 
principle  of  loyalty  to  loyalty 
relates  cause  of  each  individual 
to  the  true  and  universal  cause, 
117-128;  resulting  organiza- 
tion of  the  individual's  service 
of  causes,  130-146,  151-162; 
cause  and  conscience  as  aspects 
of  one  fact,  44,  47,  173-177. 
The  idealizing  of  individual 
causes  as  a  means  of  training 
in  loyalty,  269 ;  this  idealizing 
as  guided  by  personal  leaders, 
270-276;  as  exemplified  by 
the  history  of  lost  causes,  277- 
286 ;  the  lost  cause  as  a  link 
which  binds  individual  to 
universal  causes,  291-296,  297 ; 
the  truth  as  a  cause,  and  as  at 
present,  in  part,  a  lost  cause, 
340;  but  real  and  universal, 
340,  341 ;  the  true  cause  as 
defined    by   the    creed    of    the 


Absolute  Religion,  390.  See 
also  Loyalty,  especially  Loy- 
alty to  Loyalty. 

Charles  I :  incident  of  the 
King's  invasion  of  the  House 
of  Commons,  103-107. 

Childhood  :  preparation  for  loy- 
alty, and  rudiments  of  loyalty 
in  childhood,  259-262;  ideal 
comrades,  260;  gangs  of  boys, 
262 ;  talebearing  and  the  child- 
ish code  of  honor,  262,  263. 

Chinese  Sages  :  influence  of, 
upon  the  Japanese  ideal  of 
loyalty,  73. 

Christianity  :  due  to  loyalty 
to  a  lost  cause,  279,  280,  283, 
293. 

Civil  War,  American  :  loyalty  to 
loyalty  displayed  upon  both 
sides;  resulting  service  of  the 
one  cause  of  the  nation,  193. 

Commercial  Honesty  :  as  an 
instance  of  the  principle  of 
loyalty  to  loyalty,   141. 

Conflict  :  the  mutual  warfare 
of  causes  as  a  supreme  evil, 
114-117;  loyalty  to  loyalty 
as  averse  to  such  conflicts,  119, 
126,  144;  where  conflict  is 
inevitable,  the  principle  of 
loyalty  to  loyalty  neverthe- 
less applies,  and  determines 
the  ethics  of  conflict,  158,  102, 
214.  The  decision  of  Con- 
science as  between  conflicting 
forms  of  personal  loyalty,  179- 
196.  See  Conscience  and 
Decisiveness. 

Conformity,  Social  :  34,  35,  38, 
41,  58;  is  never  a  satisfactory 
expression  of  the  individual 
will,  unless  it  becomes  part  of 
loyalty,  60,  62,  63,  66,  82-84, 
91,  98,  124-126,  199.  See  also 
Self-will,  Self,  and  Loyalty. 

Conscience:  "Dictates  of,"  162, 
164,  180 ;  loyalty  as  apparently 
opposed  to  conscience,  63; 
the  problem  of  conscience 
stated,    166;     the    solution    of 


400 


INDEX 


this  problem  depends  upon  that 
of  the  problem  of  the  Self,  167  ; 
the  Self  as  defined  by  a  plan 
of  life,  168,  169;  loyalty  as  a 
means  of  defining  a  plan  of 
life,  170-172;  "my  cause  is 
my  conscience,"  44,  47,  173 ; 
cause,  ideal,  and  conscience  in 
their  relations,  174-177.;  con- 
science not  the  root  but  the 
flower  of  moral  life,  177; 
fallibility  of  conscience,  177, 
178;  conscience  as  an  indi- 
vidual possession,  179;  doubt- 
ful cases  of  conscience,  180- 
196;  decisiveness  and  fidelity 
as  requirements  of  conscience, 
185  sqq. ;  conscience  as  the 
"response  of  the  entire  na- 
ture," 195,  196. 

Conventional  Morality  :  is 
criticised  in  modern  discussion, 
3-6 ;  needs  revision,  9,  10 ; 
consists  of  a  maze  of  precepts  of 
various  origin,  149,  150;  yet 
expresses  significant  truth,  150 ; 
has  an  "immortal  soul,"  11, 
12;  needs  to  be  unified,  149- 
151 ;  can  be  revised  and  ra- 
tionally unified  in  terms  of  the 
principle  of  loyalty  to  loyalty, 
139-146,  159-162. 

Courtesy  :  as  a  special  instance 
of  the  principle  of  loyalty  to 
loyalty,  155. 

Creed  :  of  the  Absolute  Religion, 
390. 

David  :  the  throne  of,  279. 

Death  :  in  relation  to  loyalty, 
90,  91,  235,  293-295,  353,  398. 

Decisiveness  :  as  one  aspect  of 
loyalty,  as  a  requirement  of 
conscience,  and  as  leading  to 
and  accompanying  fidelity, 
179-196 ;  the  conflicting  claims 
of  various  loyalties  when  they 
appeal  to  the  same  person,  181 ; 
illustrations,  182-184 ;  the  duty 
to  decide,  185-190;  decision 
must  be  followed  up  by  faith- 


fulness, 190;  conscience  as 
the  deciding  principle,  192; 
mystery,  fallibility,  and  duti- 
fulness  of  the  conscientious 
decision,  193-196. 

Desires  :  natural,  not  to  be  de- 
fined simply  in  terms  of  pleas- 
ure and  pain,  28-30 ;  are  count- 
less and  conflicting,  id.,  31,  57, 
81,  123,  124;  are  not  to  be 
unified  through  mere  social 
authority,  32-35,  82-84;  nor 
gratified  by  the  attainment  of 
individual  power,  84-89 ;  but 
reach  reasonable  unity  only 
through  loyalty,  38-45,  57-59, 
124,  125. 

Devotion  :  not  an  adequate 
synonym  for  Loyalty,  253. 

Divorce:  221. 

Duty  :  problem  of,  stated,  24 ; 
my  duty  as  my  own  will 
brought  to  clear  self -conscious- 
ness, 25;  thesis  that  duty  can 
be  defined  in  terms  of  loyalty, 
15;  loyalty  to  loyalty  as  a 
duty,  121 ;  special  duties  as 
forms  of  loyalty  to  loyalty, 
129,  132,  133,  141 ;  sketch  of  a 
classification  of  duties,  142- 
146,  159-161;  fidelity  and 
decisiveness  as  duties,  185-196 ; 
duties  and  rights,  in  their 
relations  to  one  another,  65— 
68,  91,  143,  150,  162. 

Eckhart,  Meister  :  97,  125. 

Emmaus  :  the  legend  of  the  dis- 
ciples on  the  road  to,  293. 

Eternal,  The:  344,  348,  356; 
loyalty  as  the  will  to  manifest 
the  eternal  in  the  deeds  of  a 
Self,  357 ;  religion  as  the  in- 
terpretation of  the  eternal,  377  ; 
truth  concerning  the  eternal 
summarized,  389-398. 

Ethics  :  modern  tendency 
towards  revision  of  ethical 
doctrine,  3-6;  practical  con- 
sequences of  this  tendency,  8; 
consequent  need  of  a  revision 


2d 


401 


INDEX 


of  ethical  standards,  9-12 ; 
limitations  of  the  study  of 
ethics  proposed  in  the  present 
work,  7;  a  revision  of  ethical 
doctrine  no  mere  break  with 
the  past,  11,  12;  problem  of 
ethics  stated,  24-31 ;  this 
problem  insoluble  in  terms  of 
mere  convention,  33-37 ;  loy- 
alty as  a  personal  solution  of 
the  problem  for  any  given 
individual,  38-47;  the  ethics 
of  individualism  discussed,  59- 
98;  loyalty  to  loyalty  as  a 
general  solution  of  the  problem 
of  ethics,  111-128;  applica- 
tion of  this  solution  to  the 
special  virtues,  128-146.  See 
also  Conscience,  Duty,  Loy- 
alty, Morality. 

Evil  :  problem  of,  394. 

Expediency  and  Truth  :  322, 
331-340. 

Fair  Play  :  in  sport  as  a  form  of 
loyalty  to  loyalty,  158,  163, 
267. 

Family,  The  :  in  modern  Ameri- 
can life,  220-228;  decline  of 
family  authority,  220,  221; 
the  family  ties  are  opportunities 
for  loyalty,  or  else  forms  of 
loyalty,  221 ;  their  value,  221- 
223 ;  the  preciousness  of  family 
loyalty,  223-228. 

Fidelity  :  to  the  personal  cause 
once  chosen,  is  an  inseparable 
aspect  of  the  principle  of 
loyalty  to  loyalty,  157,  190- 
192,  207,  221,  222,  226;  but  is 
also  limited  in  its  range  of 
application  by  that  principle, 
208 ;  and  hereby  the  conditions 
which  may  require  the  break- 
ing of  ties  are  defined,  157,  208, 
224. 

Fichte,  J.  G. :  325,  326. 

Fortune  :  contrast  between  for- 
tune as  viewed  by  the  power- 
seekers  and  as  viewed  by  the 
loyal,  87-92. 


Fourth  of  July  :  267. 
Friendship  :  287. 

Generosity  :  150, 161. 

George,  Henry  :  4. 

Good,  The  :  is  determined  for 
each  individual  by  his  own  will 
and  desire,  25;  but  is  yet  not 
definable  in  terms  of  pleasure 
and  pain,  28 ;  nor  yet  in  terms 
of  happiness,  81 ;  nor  in  terms 
of  social  conformity,  82-84 ; 
nor  in  terms  of  Power,  84-92; 
nor  in  terms  of  autonomy 
apart  from  loyalty,  93;  nor  in 
terms  of  serenity  apart  from 
activity,  95-97.  Loyalty  as  a 
supreme  good  for  the  indi- 
vidual, 21-24,  39-47,  57-59, 
75-77,  98,  112-114,  124,  125- 
152;  loyalty  to  loyalty  as  an 
universal  good,  118,  126,  127, 
153-158;  the  good  and  the 
expedient  in  relation  to  the 
concept  of  truth,  322,  323,  328- 
331,  337-340;  the  good  in  its 
relation  to  the  problem  of  evil, 
392 ;  the  goodness  of  the  world 
no  reason  for  a  "moral  holi- 
day," 395. 

Gray's  Elegy  :  cited,  123. 

Grief  and  Imagination  :  as  the 
accompaniments  of  loyalty  to 
lost  causes,  283;  consequences 
of  this  union,  281-285;  rela- 
tion between  religion  and  mo- 
rality thus  brought  to  pass, 
285,  286;  the  higher  ethical 
religions  as  the  products  of 
grief  and  imagination,   388. 

Hegel:  on  the  "self-estranged 
social  mind,"  238-241 ;  on  the 
nature  of  truth,   325. 

Hesitancy  :  corrected  by  loyalty, 
22 ;  opposed  by  the  decisiveness 
which  loyalty  requires,  185- 
196.  False  individualism  as  a 
form  of  hesitancy,  98. 

Holidays  :  267. 

Hora  Novissima  :  283. 


402 


INDEX 


Ibsen  :  4,  98. 

Idealizing  of  the  Cause  :  proc- 
ess described  and  illustrated, 
268  sqq. ;  relation  to  lost  causes, 
276-286,  291-298;  to  art  and 
religion,  288-291 ;  to  religious 
truth,  386-398 ;  to  the  general 
theory  of  truth  and  reality, 
Lectures  VII  and  VIII. 

Imagination  :  in  its  influence 
upon  the  idealizing  of  lost 
causes,  and  upon  the  origin  of 
higher  religion,  see  Grief  and 
Imagination. 

Independence  :  as  an  ideal  of 
individual  life,  92-95.  See  Au- 
tonomy, Authority,  Indi- 
vidualism, and  Loyalty. 

Individualism  :  as  an  assailant 
of  conventional  morality  in 
recent  times,  4 ;  the  ethics  of 
individualism  discussed,  59-98; 
four  forms  of  individualism 
illustrated,  60-70;  comparison 
of  the  Japanese  type  of  loyalty 
with  the  claims  of  individualism, 
70-76;  basis  and  relative 
justification  of  individualism, 
77-80;  criticism  of  special 
individualistic  ideals,  81-98  ; 
individual  happiness  as  an 
ideal,  81,  cf.  28-30;  revolt  of 
individualism  against  mere 
conventionality  justified,  84 ; 
power  as  an  individualistic 
ideal,  84-91 ;  moral  autonomy, 
92-94,  cf.  24-26;  individual 
serenity,  95-97 ;  individualism 
fulfilled  only  in  loyalty,  98; 
loyalty  as  determined  by  in- 
dividual choice,  110,  130,  133, 
185-196 ;  the  reconciliation  of 
loyalty  and  individualism,  199, 
200,  223-228;  the  individual 
without  loyalty  as  a  "spoke  out 
of  a  wheel,"  222;  as  morally 
dead,  225 ;  the  moral  self  as 
defined  through  its  cause,  171, 
172. 

Instincts  :  their  variety  and 
their    relation    to    desires,    to 


pleasure,  and  to  pain,  28-30. 
See  also  Desires,  and  Pleas- 
ure and  Pain. 
Israel  :  religion  of,  due  to  loyalty 
to  a  lost  cause,  278,  279 ;  con- 
sequences for  Christianity  and 
for  the  world,  279,  280,  293. 

James,  Professor  William  :  On 
"The  Will  to  Believe,"  189, 
357;  his  doctrine  regarding 
the  nature  of  truth  expounded, 
315-323;  criticised,  324-340; 
the  author's  obligations  to  him 
as  teacher  and  friend,  325-327. 

Japanese  Loyalty  :  see  Bushido, 
72-77. 

Japanese  Patriotism  :  id.,  see 
also  235. 

Johns  Hopkins  University  :  325. 

Justice  :  definition  of,  144 ;  is 
one  aspect  of  loyalty,  id.,  see 
also  15 ;  its  relation  to  benevo- 
lence and  kindness,  145,  162. 

Kant  :  26,  64,  79,  325. 

Labor-unions  :  229-232,  244. 

Lee,  Robert  E. :  183,  193. 

Legend  :   in  religion,  390. 

Liberty  :  without  loyalty  is 
worthless  to  any  people,  211. 

Lincoln,  Abraham  :  212. 

Lost  Causes  :  their  significance 
for  the  history  and  for  the 
individual  training  of  loyalty, 
277-286,  291-295;  for  the 
unifying  of  the  moral  and  the 
religious  consciousness,  297, 
298,  386-389. 

Love  of  Mankind  :  in  relation 
to  the  principle  of  loyalty  to 
loyalty,  150,  159-162,  214. 

Loyalty  :  plan  of  a  Philosophy  of 
Loyalty  outlined,  12-16 ;  pre- 
liminary definition  of  loyalty, 
16,  17,  cf.  also  252-254;  final 
definition  of  loyalty,  357 ; 
relation  of  loyalty  to  the  con- 
cept of  a  cause  to  which  one  is 
loyal,  18,  19;    loyalty  never  a 


403 


INDEX 


service  of  the  wholly  impersonal, 
20;  social  interests  necessary 
to  loyalty,  252,  254-257;  the 
cause  as  a  tie  that  binds  in- 
dividuals into  an  unity,  20, 
cf.  307-312,  329,  347,  348, 
355-357;  the  good  of  loyalty, 
complexity  of  the  question,  21 ; 

*  value  of  loyalty  for  the  loyal 
man,  22 ;  relation  of  this  value 
to  the  problem  of  the  plan  of 
life,  24-37 ;  how  loyalty  may 
appear  as  a  personal  solution 
of  this  problem,  38  sqq. ;  loy- 
alty as  an  intensification  of 
self-consciousness,  41 ;  yet  as 
a  subordination  of  self-will,  42 ; 
patriotism  and  the  war-spirit 
as  simple  illustrations  of  loy- 
alty, 39-41 ;  but  not  as  the 
principal       illustrations,       43 ; 

*  fruits  of  loyalty,  44—46 ;  loy- 
alty as  essential  to  peace  in 
active  living,  46 ;  doubts  as  to 
whether  the  worthy  cause  can 
be  found,  47,  48 ;  summary  of 
the    value    of   loyalty    for    the 

*  individual,  51-59 ;  individual- 
istic objections  to  the  value  of 
loyalty  for  the  loyal  individual, 
59-70;  loyalty  as  opposed  to 
personal  independence,  60,  61 ; 
as  opposed  to  the  development 
of  conscience,  62,  63 ;  loyalty 
as  opposed  to  self-assertion, 
65-68 ;  as  opposed  to  spiritual- 
ity, 69 ;  Japanese  loyalty  as  a 
counter-instance  with  which 
to  answer  all  these  objections  to 
loyalty,  70-76;  the  failure  of 
individualism  to  satisfy  the 
individual  unless  it  assumes 
the  form  of  loyalty,  77-97; 
loyalty  in  relation  to  fortune, 
and  to  the  failure  of  our  search 
for  individual  power,  89-91 ; 
the  loyal  as  "always  at  home," 
despite  ill  fortune,  91 ;  loyalty 
and  independence  of  moral 
judgment,  92-95 ;  loyalty  as 
the    fulfilment    of    spirituality, 


97 ;  synthesis  of  loyalty  and 
individualism,  98;  loyalty  as 
illustrated  by  the  Speaker  in 
presence  of  King  Charles,  101- 
105  ;  personal  dignity  of  loyalty, 
105-107.  —  Loyalty  to  Loy- 
alty as  a  solution  of  the  problem 
of  the  search  for  a  worthy  cause, 
107-146;  difficulty  of  the 
definition  of  a  cause  worthy  of 
loyalty,  107-111;  loyalty  as  a 
common  human  good,  112-114; 
the  conflict  of  causes,  and  of 
loyalties,  as  an  evil,  114,  115; 
and  as  a  supreme  evil,  116,  117  ; 
a  cause  is  good  in  so  far  as  it 
furthers  universal  loyalty,  118; 
the  principle  of  loyalty  to 
loyalty  stated,  121 ;  defended, 
122-128;  is  not  an  unpractical 
principle,  128-139 ;  the  com- 
monplace virtues  as  instances 
of  loyalty  to  loyalty,  129 ; 
the  system  of  causes  required 
in  order  to  be  loyal  to  loyalty, 
132;  each  man's  cause  to  be 
individually  chosen,  131,  133; 
indirect  influence  of  one  man's 
loyalty  upon  the  general  loy- 
alty, 134-138;  a  personal  il- 
lustration of  this  principle, 
135-137  ;  loyalty  is  contagious, 
137  ;  the  rational  duties  of  the 
civilized  man  as  instances  of 
loyalty  to  loyalty,  139;  truth- 
speaking  as  a  form  of  loyalty, 
140;  commercial  honesty,  as 
another  form,  141 ;  duties  to 
self,  in  the  light  of  the  principle 
of  loyalty,  142;  rights,  143; 
duties  to  neighbors,  144 ;  be- 
nevolence and  justice  as  morally 
valuable  only  when  determined 
by  loyalty,  144-146 ;  summary 
of  the  theory  of  loyalty  to 
loyalty,  149-162  ;  courtesy  and 
loyalty,  155;  universal  respect 
for  the  loyalty  of  all  men  a 
duty,  157,  158;  solution  of 
popular  moral  perplexities 
through  the  principle  of  loyalty 


404 


INDEX 


to  loyalty,  160-162.  The  re- 
lations of  loyalty  to  Con- 
science, 162-196  (see  Con- 
science) .  Further  illustra- 
tions and  summaries  regarding 
loyalty,  200-211 ;  loyalty  va- 
ries with  the  individual,  200 ; 
loyalty  to  loyalty  as  a  principle 
that  requires  us  to  be  strict 
towards  ourselves,  liberal,  in 
our  judgments  towards  others, 
203-207;  fidelity  and  loyalty 
inseparable,  190,  191,  207,  221 ; 
loyalty  to  loyalty  existed  in 
both  the  North  and  the  South 
during  the  civil  war,  193 ;  con- 
sequences hereof,  id.;  problem 
of  teaching  loyalty  a  difficult 
one,  211 ;  how  to  be  dealt 
with,  215-217,  232,  245-248, 
258-298.  —  Loyalty  in  Rela- 
tion to  American  Problems, 
211-248;  present  status  of 
loyalty  in  our  national  life, 
213,  217-219,  223,  228-232, 
241-244;  the  problem  of  fam- 
ily loyalty,  220-228;  loyalty 
to  the  national  government, 
233-236 ;  provincialism  as  a 
means  of  training  loyalty,  245- 
248.  —  Training  for  Loy- 
alty, involves  personal  leaders 
and  the  idealizing  of  causes, 
269-276,  and  also  labors  which 
exercise  loyalty,  296-298;  loy- 
alty rudimentary  in  childhood, 
258-263 ;  relations  of  childhood 
imagination  to  loyalty,  260; 
respect  for  the  beginnings  of 
childish  loyalty  important,  252 ; 
loyalty  in  youth,  263-268; 
fraternities  and  sports,  265, 
266;  fair  play  in  sport,  267; 
public  holidays,  267,  268; 
illustrations  of  adult  training 
in  loyalty,  270-275  ;  lost  causes 
and  their  importance  for  loy- 
alty, 277-286,  291-296  ;  art  in 
its  relation  to  loyalty,  289, 
290.  —  Metaphysical  Aspects 
of    Loyalty,     301-310,    355- 


360;  loyalty  involves  a  belief 
that  the  cause  is  real,  301,  304, 
306,  307 ;  spiritual  unity  of  life 
implied  by  this  belief,  309; 
consequent  opposition  between 
the  philosophy  of  loyalty  and 
recent  pragmatism,  313-316 ; 
exposition  and  criticism  of 
pragmatism,  316-340 ;  the  view 
of  the  nature  of  truth  which 
loyalty  demands,  328-340,  358- 
365;  relations  of  loyalty  to 
Religion,  377-398. 

Marx,  Karl  :   4. 

Memorial  Day  :  267.  ^>» 

Messianic  Idea  :  279. 

Morality  :  modern  critics  of 
moral  traditions,  3,  4;  these 
critics  are  often  themselves 
moral  leaders,  4;  need  of  a 
criticism  and  revision  of  con- 
ventional morality,  9-11 ;  moral 
standards  possess  a  meaning 
that  remains  permanent  de- 
spite revisions,  11,12;  loyalty 
as  the  fulfilment  of  the  moral 
law,  15;  moral  standards  as 
the  expression  of  the  individual 
will  rationalized  and  brought 
to  self -consciousness,  24-27 ; 
individualism  in  morality,  ex- 
pounded, illustrated,  and  criti- 
cised, 59-98;  the  moral  code 
of  loyalty  to  loyalty,  119-134, 
142-144,  156-162,  200-211 ; 
moral  problems  in  American 
life,  211-248;  morality  and 
religion,  their  conflict  and  their 
reconciliation,  377-398.  See 
also  Conscience,  Duty, 
Ethics,  Loyalty. 

Napoleon:   88,  91. 

Nature  :  human  nature,  apart 
from  social  training,  determines 
no  definite  tendency  of  the 
will,  31 ;  but  furnishes  to  us 
a  collection  of  unorganized 
desires,  27-30 ;  yet  is  predis- 
posed   to    the    acquisition    of 


405 


INDEX 


social  training,  32;  is  in  need 
of  unified  plans  of  life,  57-59, 
123-125;  and  possesses  an 
innate  power  to  acquire  a  con- 
science, 177. 

Nietzsche:   4,  85,  98,  381,  382. 

Nitobe  :  72. 

Obedience  :  in  relation  to  loy- 
alty, 40,  41,  72-77,  82-84, 
98,  102-106,  109,  124,  125, 
220,  221. 

Old  Testament  :  279. 

Omar  Khayyam  :   quoted,  58. 

Pain  :    see  Pleasure  and  Pain. 

Patriotism  :  39-41 ;  Japanese, 
72-77,  235;  lack  of  true  pa- 
triotism in  modern  American 
fife,  228-237. 

Philosophy  :  13. 

Philosophy  of  Loyalty  :  use 
and  definition  of  the  phrase, 
12-14;  outline  of  the  plan  of 
such  a  philosophy,  14-16 ; 
general  summary  of  the  philos- 
ophy of  loyalty,  351-358 ;  a 
philosophy  of  loyalty  must  in- 
clude a  theory  about  the  real 
universe,  301-307.  See  also 
Loyalty,  Conscience,  Indi- 
vidualism, Morality. 

Plans  of  Life  :  their  social  ori- 
gin, and  their  relation  to 
loyalty,  34,  38,  42,  57;  to  the 
definition  of  the  Self,  167-172 ; 
to  conscience,  172-179;  the 
duty  of  decisiveness  regarding 
the  plans  of  life,  185-196. 

Plato:  26. 

Pleasure  and  Pain  :  in  what 
way  objects  of  desire,  28,  29 ; 
the  art  of  pleasure  seeking  one 
of  the  hardest  of  arts,  30 ;  the 
good  not  definable  in  terms  of 
happiness,  81,  82;  the  pain  of 
defeat  as  an  aid  in  the  idealiz- 
ing of  lost  causes,  281-284, 
295;  the  pain  of  labor  for  the 
cause  as  an  aid  to  loyalty,  296, 
297 :     suffering    as    an     indis- 


pensable aspect  of  the  spiritual 
fife,  393. 

Plotinus  :  69. 

Political  Parties  in  America  : 
229-232. 

Portia  :  127. 

Power  :  doctrine  that  the  high- 
est good  for  the  individual  is 
power,  stated,  84;  illustrated 
by  the  thesis  of  Nietzsche,  85, 
86  ;  the  doctrine  criticised,  86- 
89;  contrast  between  the 
search  for  power  and  the  loyal 
service  of  a  cause,  89-91 ; 
summary  of  the  case  against 
power  as  an  ideal,  91,  92; 
national  prowess  valuable  as 
an  instrument  for  serving 
universal  loyalty,  214. 

Pragmatism  :  as  a  doctrine  con- 
cerning the  nature  of  truth, 
315  sqq.;  Professor  William 
James's  form  of  pragmatism 
expounded,  316-323 ;  criticised, 
324-340;  in  what  sense  the 
author's  theory  of  truth  is  a 
form  of  pragmatism,  324-326; 
in  what  sense  opposed  to  the 
doctrine  of  James,  327-331 ; 
the  pragmatist  on  the  witness- 
stand,  331 ;  in  what  sense 
truth  transcends  all  verifica- 
tions in  terms  of  individual 
human  experiences,  339,  340; 
bankruptcy  of  recent  prag- 
matism, 346,  347.     See  Truth. 

Provincialism  :  as  an  antidote 
to  the  evils  of  the  "self- 
estranged  social  mind "  in 
America,  and  as  a  means  for 
the  teaching  of  loyalty,  245- 
248. 

Reality  :  the  theory  of  truth  and 
of  reality  which  is  needed  to 
complete  the  philosophy  of 
loyalty,  301-313;  truth  seek- 
ing and  loyalty,  313-315; 
relation  of  this  doctrine  of 
truth  and  reality  to  pragma- 
tism, 315-340 ;  warrant  for  the 


406 


INDEX 


doctrine  of  reality  here  in  ques- 
tion, 340-348,  358-373;  reli- 
gious interpretation  of  reality, 
377;  in  what  sense  a  true 
interpretation,  390,  392;  re- 
lation of  the  true  and  the 
mythical  elements  in  this  in- 
terpretation, 392-398. 

Religion  :  3,  5,  179 ;  definition 
of,  377 ;  relations  to  morality 
often  those  of  conflict,  378 ; 
the  efforts  to  reconcile  religion 
and  morality,  379;  grief  and 
imagination  as  the  parents  of 
higher  ethical  religion,  388; 
contrast  and  harmony  of  loy- 
alty and  religion,  382-389; 
the  creed  of  the  Absolute  Reli- 
gion, 390  ;  its  justification,  391- 
396 ;  mythical  accompaniments 
and  embodiments  of  religion, 
282-284,  292,  390,  397;  their 
true  significance,  398.  Pa- 
triotism part  of  a  religion  with 
the  Japanese,  235;  not  so  at 
present  in  our  own  country, 
236,  237. 

Responsibility  :  the  conscious- 
ness of  individual  responsibility 
hindered  (according  to  an 
opponent  of  loyalty),  by  the 
cultivation  of  loyalty,  62,  63 ; 
the  objection  answered,  64,  65, 
71-76,  92-95. 

Restlessness  :  modern,  in  regard 
to  traditions,  and,  in  particular, 
in  regard  to  ethical  traditions, 
2-6;  consequent  need  of  a 
revision  of  ethical  standards, 
9-12 ;  such  a  revision  no  mere 
break  with  the  past,  11,  12; 
loyalty  as  an  antidote  for  moral 
restlessness,  22,  44,  45,  73,  76, 
95-97. 

Right  and  Wrong  :  the  problem 
of  their  distinction  is  soluble 
only  in  terms  of  our  own  will, 
24.  See  Duty,  Conscience, 
Ethics,  Loyalty. 

Rights  :  their  relation  to  duties 
from  the  point  of  view  of  some 


forms  of  modern  individual- 
ism, 66-68;  such  individual- 
ism opposed  by  the  spirit  of 
loyalty,  75;  yet  loyalty  in- 
volves some  assertion  of  indi- 
vidual rights,  42 ;  rights  de- 
fined in  terms  of  loyalty,  143, 
161,  162. 
Russian  :  protest  of  a  young 
Russian  against  loyalty,  cited 
and  summarized,  60,  61,  67, 
68,  95,  211;    answered,  92-95. 

Samurai,  Japanese  :  the  ethical 
code  of  the  Samurai  charac- 
terized, 72-77;  cf.  98,  113. 

Self  :  duty  determined  by  the 
rational  will  of  the  Self,  24-27 ; 
difficulty  in  discovering  what 
this  will  is,  27-38;  loyalty  as 
a  practical  solution  of  this 
difficulty,  38-44,  57-59,  71-77 ; 
social  nature  of  the  self,  and 
paradox  of  the  conflict  between 
self-will  and  social  convention, 
32-37;  individualism  without 
loyalty  no  solution  of  the  prob- 
lem, 81-98,  210,  211,  224-227; 
loyalty  as  a  synthesis  of  self- 
assertion  and  self -surrender, 
41-44,  75,  98,  199,  211;  the 
self  as  the  centre  of  its  own 
moral  world,  illusion  and  truth 
in  this  view  of  moral  values, 
77-80,  124 ;  duties  to  self,  142, 
143,  150,  161,  162;  the  unified 
self  as  defined  by  its  plan  of 
life,  167-172;  relation  of  the 
self  to  its  loyalty,  171 ;  conse- 
quent doctrine  of  the  con- 
science,  172-179. 

Self-control  :  as  related  to 
Japanese  loyalty,  76 ;  as  re- 
lated to  loyalty  in  general,  97, 
150,  161 ;  cf.  287,  291-298. 

Self-will:  in  its  relation  to 
social  conventions  and  to  natu- 
ral desires  and  instincts,  31- 
38;  in  its  relation  to  loyalty, 
38-44,  90,  93-95.  See  Self 
and  Will. 


407 


INDEX 


Serenity:  as  an  ethical  ideal, 
68,  69,  95-97.  See  Spiritual- 
ity. 

Socialism  :  4. 

Social  Mind  :  the  "  self-estranged 
social  mind "  of  Hegel's  Phe- 
nomenology, 238-241 ;  relation 
of  this  conception  to  modern 
American  conditions,  241-244 ; 
provincialism  as  an  antidote, 
245-248. 

Social  Will  :  as  the  result  of 
social  training,  38. 

Society  :  as  the  teacher  of  con- 
ventional morality,  24,  32,  33- 
35 ;  is  no  final  moral  authority, 
25,  82-84;  and  nevertheless, 
a  cause,  for  a  loyal  man,  must 
be  social,  20,  254-257 ;  Ameri- 
can social  conditions  discussed, 
219-248.  See  Loyalty  in  Re- 
lation to  American  Prob- 
lems. 

Socrates  :  26. 

Speaker  :  of  the  House  of  Com- 
mons :  incident  of  the  Speak- 
er's answer  to  King  Charles  I, 
103-107,  120. 

Spinoza  :  88. 

Spirituality  :  as  opposed  to  loy- 
alty by  one  form  of  ethical 
individualism,  68-70 ;  as,  never- 
theless, illustrated  by  Japanese 
loyalty,  73 ;  as  properly  to  be 
obtained  only  through  loyalty, 
95-97. 

Sport  :  see  Fair  Play. 

Steinmetz,  Dr.  Rudolf:  his 
"Philosophy  of  War,"  12, 
13. 

Success  :  as  defined  in  terms  of 
loyalty,  89-91,  327-331,  341- 
343,  348. 

Sympathy  :  training  in  sympathy 
is  not  necessarily  training  in 
loyalty ;  results  as  they  appear 
in  our  American  fife,  217- 
220. 

Taylor,  Bayard:  97. 
Thanksgiving  Day  :  267. 


Thomas,  Saint  Thomas  Aquinas  : 
70. 

Tolstoi  :  4. 

Tradition  :  modern  assaults  upon, 
3-6 ;  ethical  traditions  also 
affected  by  this  tendency,  3,  4 ; 
especial  importance  of  the 
assault  upon  tradition  in  the 
case  of  ethics,  5,  6 ;  revision 
of  tradition  needed,  9,  10; 
such  revision  not  a  mere  break 
with  the  past,  11,  12;  relations 
of  loyalty  to  tradition,  53,  102, 
133. 

Training  for  Loyalty  :  see 
under  Loyalty. 

Transmutation  :  of  moral  values, 
Nietzsche's  movement  towards 
the,  4,  5. 

Truth  :  the  theory  of  truth  and 
reality  which  is  demanded  by 
the  philosophy  of  loyalty,  301- 
315 ;  this  theory  opposed  by 
recent  pragmatism,  315;  ex- 
position of  Professor  William 
James's  pragmatism,  316-323 ; 
criticism  of  this  theory,  324- 
340;  the  author's  theory  of 
truth,  340-348,  358-364;  its 
relation  to  the  theory  of  reality, 
365-373;  its  relation  to  the 
doctrine  of  loyalty  further  dis- 
cussed, 373-376 ;  our  theory  of 
truth  meets  at  once  an  ethical 
and  a  logical  need,  376 ;  con- 
sequences for  the  doctrine  re- 
garding the  relations  of  loyalty 
to  religion,  377-398. 

Truth-speaking  :  as  an  instance 
of  the  principle  of  loyalty  to 
loyalty,  140,  144,  154. 

Union  :  of  various  individuals  in 
one  life  as  a  necessary  condition 
for  the  definition  of  a  fitting 
cause  to  which  one  can  be 
loyal,  20,  52  (cf.  61),  58,  126, 
268-276,  326;  view  regarding 
the  real  world  which  must  be 
true  if  individuals  are  thus  in 
union  through  their  causes, 
307-310,  312,  313;    defence  of 


408 


INDEX 


this  view  against  pragmatism, 
315-340;  the  positive  warrant 
for  viewing  the  union  of  indi- 
viduals as  real,  340-348,  358- 
376. 

Unity  :  of  individual  life,  as  a 
result  of  loyalty,  22,  58,  124, 
133,  169-172;  as  related  to 
conscience,  172-179.  —  The 
unity  of  various  individuals  in 
one  super-individual  life  as  de- 
manded by  the  conception  of 
a  cause,  20,  307-313.  See 
Cause,  Loyalty,  Religion, 
and  Union. 

Universe  :  307.  See  Reality 
and  Truth. 

Values,  Moral  :  they  must  be 
estimated  in  terms  of  the  indi- 
vidual point  of  view,  25,  77-80 ; 
yet  the  individual  can  define 
values  truly  only  in  terms  of 
loyalty,  81-98 ;  the  true  value 
of  loyalty  definable  only 
through  a  theory  of  truth  and 
reality,  301-312;  the  value  of 
the  world  life,  392-398.  See 
Good  and  Loyalty. 

Virtues  :  the  commonplace  as 
well  as  the  fundamental  virtues 
as  special  forms  of  loyalty  to 
loyalty,  130.  See  also  under 
Loyalty. 


War-spirit:  as  an  illustration 
of  loyalty,  39-41,  53;  in  rela- 
tion to  Japanese  Bushido,  72; 
is  not  usually  just  in  its  esti- 
mate of  the  enemy's  loyalty, 
109 ;  is  no  more  characteristic 
than  many  other  forms  of 
loyalty,  54,  102,  113;  involves 
the  evil  of  assailing  the  loyalty 
of  the  enemy,  115;  how  the 
war-spirit  is  to  be  judged  in 
the  light  of  the  general  prin- 
ciple of  loyalty  to  loyalty,  214, 
215. 

Whitman,  Walt  :  98. 

Will  :  my  duty  as  my  own  will 
brought  to  clear  self-conscious- 
ness, 25 ;  difficulty  of  defining 
what  my  own  will  is,  27-37; 
loyalty  as  a  solution  of  the 
problem,  38-47.  —  The  indi- 
vidual will,  interest,  and  desire, 
determine  the  choice  of  the 
right  cause,  subject  to  the  prin- 
ciple of  loyalty  to  loyalty,  19, 
39-42,  52-54,  58,  93,  110,  125, 
130,  131,  138,  156,  157,  177, 
186,  187,  226,  cf.  117-128.— 
The  "will  of  the  world"  in 
relation  to  our  loyalty,  390- 
391 ;  the  individual  will  and 
the  universal  will,  395. 

Zion:  279. 


409 


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